Slumlord argues that prior to modern feminism what we had was affirmative action for men:

The thing is when you take the shackles away from some women they actually outperform men (in certain areas) and many of you simply can’t accept this fact blaming it on Feminist mind control, whatever. The cognitive neuroscientist have a name for this type of error; Magical thinking.

The traditional way of dealing with this natural superiority was to put disabilities on women while privileging men. When my parents came to Australia, my mother worked in a Tannery for half the wages of the man working next to her. (Brad A. Natural justice? Wondering why the feminists get an ear amongst otherwise normal women.) Turning the clock back will simply reset things to the preconditions that allowed feminism to thrive. So it’s not gonna work.

I’ve addressed a similar argument of his about feminism “unshackling women” previously, but his specific claim around legal discrimination by sex in wages had me curious what I could find on this. Slumlord is referring to Australia with regard to his mother’s experience, but since I’m in the US and we are discussing the West in general I looked for information on the US. Infoplease explains that until 1963 it was legal in the US to discriminate based on sex when it came to job positions and wages:

Help wanted—Separate and Unequal

Until the early 1960s, newspapers published separate job listings for men and women. Jobs were categorized according to sex, with the higher level jobs listed almost exclusively under “Help Wanted—Male.” In some cases the ads ran identical jobs under male and female listings—but with separate pay scales. Separate, of course, meant unequal: between 1950 and 1960, women with full time jobs earned on average between 59–64 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in the same job.

It wasn’t until the passage of the Equal Pay Act on June 10, 1963 (effective June 11, 1964) that it became illegal to pay women lower rates for the same job strictly on the basis of their sex. Demonstrable differences in seniority, merit, the quality or quantity of work, or other considerations might merit different pay, but gender could no longer be viewed as a drawback on one’s resumé.

This change in the law was then followed up by further actions by the legislature and the courts:

The Courts Nix the “Going Market Rate” for Women

The act was gradually expanded over the next decade to include a larger segment of the workforce, and between June 1964 and Jan. 1971 back wages totaling more than $26 million were paid to 71,000 women.

This explains the source of the belief that women were systematically paid less for the same value of work as men under the evil patriarchy, or as Slumlord likes to say, before we “unshackled women”. But as we know, even today after decades of social engineering and ever expanding affirmative action programs for women (including it would seem in the near future the Army Rangers), women still earn less than men. This raises the question; how much of the previous difference was due to legal discrimination against women, and how much was due to women being paid less because of their different choices and productivity?

Infoplease tells us in The Wage Gap that in 1963 women earned 58 cents for every dollar earned by men. What effect did the Equal Pay Act have on women’s wages after the law went into effect in 1964 and the and the courts took aggressive action through 1971? Infoplease provides a timeline in The Wage Gap, by Gender and Race

Note that in 1975 after infoplease tells us that legal discrimination by sex was entirely abolished, the ratio of women’s earnings compared to men actually declined by half a penny to 57.5. By 1980, a full 16 years after the law took effect and more than ten years after the courts had taken aggressive action, White women still earned only 58.9 cents for every dollar earned by men. 16 years after the law passed, White women’s relative wages were less than a penny greater than under the bad old days of legal wage discrimination. Granted these aren’t apples to apples numbers, because the 1963 figure is for all women compared to all men. However, there is no reason to believe that White women were more discriminated against because of their sex than women of other races were. We can double check this as well by comparing the all races figure Infoplease gives for 2013 with the one for White women:

At the time of the EPA’s passage, women earned just 58 cents for every dollar earned by men. By 2013, that rate had increased to 78 cents.

Note that the 2013 ratio for all races (78) is the same ratio for White women in the chart above.

This early period after the change in the law matters because we know that aside from employers potentially helping men at the expense of women, women’s choices play a huge role in the differences in earnings. Women choose easier lower paying majors in school, and they tend to choose lower paying lower stress and less dangerous jobs than men. They also tend to take time off to have and raise children, lowering their peak earnings compared to men. If women were truly “shackled” under the old system, we would expect an improvement to closely follow the change in the law and actions by the courts. Likewise, changes due to affirmative action for women and changing priorities of women as feminists have radically reordered our culture would be expected to show up later. As you can see, the big changes in women’s earnings relative to men came not immediately following the change in the law, and not even in the 16 years following the change. The big changes we have seen have occurred after 1980.

Australians may well have shackled their women, and if so I would welcome Slumlord or anyone else to present data on this. But for the US at least, the idea that prior to the law changing in 1964 men received affirmative action in wages is to borrow a phrase, magical thinking.

Edit: Fixed the chart to reflect the uneven time intervals of the data set.

Women might EARN more than men. That hardly means they OUT-PRODUCE men. Go into any medical establishment. Every time I do, I see dozens of females sitting around talking. Not working. The amount of women among whom I need to shuffle my papers is sickening.

Offices? Same. Cackling hens, gibbering away to one another or one a phone. When I make business calls, I never have a male run at the mouth. Always the females. They’re fun to talk with, but they ain’t working.

If they’re black AND female, you might as well hire a mannequin. You’ll get the same output out of her.

The obvious test of the “shackled” argument is simple: form a company and only hire women. If women truly produce as much as men but are underpaid, then that company will obviously be more profitable then any competitor because of lower wage costs. The fact that this experiment has never been tried, or at least tried successfully, is strong evidence that the “shackled” meme is not based in reality. Rather, it is as Dalrock suggests, “magical thinking”.

This is one of those odd situations where equalism requires one to assert that the fact that something almost never happens is only proof that it’s being suppressed, the assumption that in the absence of suppression it would happen all the time being irrationally set in stone. If we hear dogs bark, but we don’t hear cats bark, the dogs must be stopping the cats from barking.

If all throughout history it’s been at least 90% men inventing things, creating things, starting institutions, and being the leaders of nearly every field of human endeavor, that just means that men have been very effectively suppressing women. It couldn’t possibly be that they’re just better suited to those tasks.

And the fact that men in every society throughout all time have been able to suppress women so effectively in no way implies any sort of superiority. I’m sure there are plenty of examples historically of situations where two groups are equal, but one is in charge in every case no matter what the conditions, location, or time period for millenia, right?

Can someone remind me about what percentage of upper-body strength women have on average vs. men? I was thinking it was somewhere around 65%. Which would mean women were getting paid about what they could do in the factory, depending on the work.

It’s frustrating the way people just assume that a woman doing a job is 100% as productive as a man doing the same job without ever proving it, or even acknowledging the question. They don’t even seem to recognize that it’s not a given. I know anecdotally that my being able to lift heavy things a woman wouldn’t be able to has proven useful at work many times, despite my job duties not requiring physical strength in any way — a strong employee is just more valuable than a weak one, even if their job duties don’t require it. A male employee with exactly the same qualifications is almost certainly more valuable than a female one from the employer’s perspective. And that’s without even getting into all the behavioral differences.

This raises the question; how much of the previous difference was due to legal discrimination against women, and how much was due to women being paid less because of their different choices and productivity?

Yep. In terms of productivity, women in the tech sector are grossly overpaid even if they’re earning only 50 cents to each dollar earned by a man. In fact, given their actual hindrance of productivity (as in men having to pick up the slack, if not actually do all of their actual work for them), employers would be fully justified in billing them every payday.

The thing I’m interested in is what has been the cost of these changes? For women to earn 20% more than they did prior to this social engineering, what has our civilisation paid for this paltry ‘win’?

1. The first cost is was the next generation was never born. For women to earn like men they had to introduce abortion laws, and by the 80’s young women were lining up for them. To the tune of 55 million abortions (in 2013) since Row vs. Wade.
2. Lost opportunities for men, and since women rate men on how successful they are, women lost out by having to choose from a smaller pool of eligible bachelors (“man drought”).
3. Paradoxically, increased inequality. As feminist women entered the professions they pushed out the traditional poorer men who had worked hard and previously made it in to the middle classes. So instead of poorer people bettering themselves, now we see the wives and daughters of already middle class families filling those roles. Further cementing the caste system in the West.
4. Damaged children. Kids raised by strangers, not parents.
5. Housing inequality, two income couples with no kids can easily out-afford a family with one income, pushing families to the outer suburbs, creating further inequality.
6. Immigration. As people want to get ahead, they have fewer children, so the state imports people to supplement the dropping fertility rates, creating conflict and lowering social trust and cohesion.

People need to ask themselves, is women earning 20% more worth all this?

Wow, so I was way high then. That puts women at ~50% of men’s upper-body strength.

In many jobs, obviously that would translate to a man taking half as many trips carrying things from one place to another, and therefore twice as much productivity. I’m not sure why there’s always the assumption that markets will discriminate unfairly when given a chance, given markets’ track record of going against discrimination whenever it makes money. Even in the postbellum South, businesses were starting to hire blacks despite intense cultural pressure not to, until government stepped in to outlaw it.

Ah, that’s the real point, isn’t it? Tradeoffs. Unfortunately, liberals don’t believe in tradeoffs. They take whatever successful conditions exist as a given, and assume they can mess with things to any extent without losing any of what’s already going right. Right-wingers are limited by the harsh constraints of reality, where any change will have positive and negative consequences that need to be considered.

The West is tearing itself apart trying to improve tiny numbers of marginal cases — slightly increasing wages and job opportunities for a small percentage of women; increasing societal acceptance of rare deviant behaviors; trying to get minority incomes up a little and poverty down a little. To make these societally insignificant changes, we’re incurring massive and unsustainable costs. It’s insanity.

Dalrock,
I would argue that under current law, employers, particularly large ones, have a definite incentive to discriminate in favor of women. In a wage discrimination case, the plaintiff need only demonstrate the existence of a gap in wages between similarly situated persons of different sexes. There is no requirement that the plaintiff show that the cause of the disparity is unlawful discrimination. Instead, the burden lies on the defendant to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that any proved disparity is due to other factors.

If a plaintiff can show a difference in pay between the sexes, she is in a pretty good position to force a settlement, regardless of whether the employer has a good case of one of the accepted affirmative defenses. Her bargaining position will be greatly enhanced by the fact that a willing media will disseminate the message that the defendant, having been accused, absolutely must be guilty. Since women control the large majority of all consumer spending, and since many of them are eager to believe that they are being cheated at every turn (often in the face of overwhelming evidence) this combination of factors favors women and not minorities or men. Whether and to what extent employers respond to the incentive to discriminate in favor of women is open to debate. But I think the incentive definitely exists.

That said, I would absolutely not advocate for any change in the way pay discrimination cases are litigated. I find the process to be fundamentally fair. The incentive to discriminate arises not from the law, but from other social and political factors. Women’s advocates, however, do want to change the standards to lower the amount of proof needed as a prima facie case and to restrict the defenses which a defendant could use. Meritorious cases will win under current law. Meritless cases may result in settlement. What they want is to make it easier to push meritless cases to the point at which they have leverage over the defendant. If they actually had cases in which women could not recover for proven wage disparity, they would be harping on about those cases rather than harping on about disputed statistics while largely remaining silent about the actual effect of the legislation they advocate.

Kiwi the Geek says:
June 22, 2015 at 7:45 pmOT: The churchians seem to be starting to get it.

No they aren’t. They are egalitarian which is feminism under a different name. Their model still denigrates fathers as mothers still have the final say rather than dad (who should have it according to scripture).

From the link:Dr. Meg Meeker makes the case for the importance of fathers in the lives of children, and teaches the characteristics of healthy families.

Christian men don’t need another woman to teach about the characteristics of healthy families. Women need to be learning from their men, who need to be learning from the Bible, God’s Word, and also from God’s Spirit. Dr. Dobson seemed to start out okay if his earliest books are any indication, but not long after that he took a wrong turn and has yet to recover from it IMO.

Australians may well have shackled their women, and if so I would welcome Slumlord or anyone else to present data on this.

The data is hard to find in electronic form but from 1919 to 1950 minimum hourly wage rate was set at 54% of male minimum. From 1950 to 1968 it was set at 75% , from then till 1972 when parity was achieved, rates were set at 85%. Here is the original source. Whether a woman, was married, single or widowed with children did not change the rate at all.

As an economist, you know perfectly well that the figures you present aren’t really helpful. Since the only metric that matters in the hourly rate for the same type of work. You can only compare apples with apples. This is a better analysis of your “penny shackle”.

As an economist, you know perfectly well that the figures you present aren’t really helpful. Since the only metric that matters in the hourly rate for the same type of work.

Okay, would you care to explain to me (or should I say all of us) if your data is true, why didn’t Australian companies in 1960 just hire all women and no men if they could truly get away with getting the same work for just 58 cents on the dollar? If all things were equal in 1960, hiring men to do anything in 1960 would be a stupid thing to do.

In order to prove discrimination, which you’re proposing to do, you would have to prove that women are equally productive at the same jobs and that there are no other factors related to female employees which might reasonably cause them to be less valuable in terms of productivity and costs than men. Otherwise the differences in pay mean nothing.

Basically you’re asserting that there are no reasons why an employer would expect to get more out of a male employee than a female one, or that a male employee would cost them less for the same work. These are demonstrably false assertions based on irrational equalism.

“If all things were equal in 1960, hiring men to do anything in 1960 would be a stupid thing to do.”

I know in the postwar South, before it was outlawed businesses were actually hiring black people due to the low costs of their labor relative to their productivity. They didn’t necessarily want to, but they did it because they couldn’t afford to let their competitors get an advantage by getting cheap and effective labor.

I find it very difficult to believe that men’s unwillingness to hire women was stronger in Australia in the 60’s than the desire of Southerners after the war not to hire black people. Yet that would have to be the case in order for IBB’s scenario not to happen.

Even today. Women say they still only make about 78 cents on the dollar for every dollar a man makes to do the exact same job. Why not just hire all women and save all that money? Makes perfect sense to me IF what feminists say is true.

As an Australian, I might be able to add something here. I understand that the unions used to require or at least allow women to be paid less than men on the assumption that men were breadwinners and needed bigger wages.

In some places, such as outback Broken Hill (not what Americans think of as the Outback, but the real Outback), married women used to be excluded from the workforce altogether until quite recently, because it was a mining town and that’s what the unions wanted.

As I have said before, I have seen claims that the percentage of women in full-time work in Australia has not risen much since the 1960s. Given the opportunity, most women choose to work part-time.

As for achieving more after being “unshackled”, I don’t see evidence of that in areas like business or science or engineering. I do think that women can make good administrators and civil servants. I mean that sincerely. They do.

Personally and anecdotally, I don’t remember women of my mother’s generation (in the 1960s say) being frustrated and unhappy. Rather the reverse. I do however remember a lot of breadwinning men who were stressed up the proverbial wazoo.

Anyway, that is my perspective as an Australian man.

Every time I say this, I get pounced on, but I will say it anyway. I have the strong impression that Australian women still rather like Australian men. One reason is that our women were never quite so outclassed by the men. To take one example, of all the to-do about American banknotes soon to feature a woman. All our banknotes have a man on one side and a woman on the other (I think; I shall check my wallet soon). So these things are not such a huge, big deal here.

Australians haven’t shackled their women Dalrock. Slumlord is talking out of context: Australia was a very small economy for decades, reliant on agricultural and mining profits for export. Women got less in their jobs because there simply weren’t that many jobs to go around. It was further expected that once a woman married she would stay at home and raise children, leaving her job for – wait for it – a husband who in turn would support a wife! It made sense to pay women less then, so that some families would have some job market participation in a job- scarce environment. To pay women equal wages would mean unemployment for two adults in a some families with dire welfare results.

While the USA has had the Equal Pay Act a full 2 years before I was born and still haven’t caught up – John Kerry and Hilary Clinton talk about “80c in the dollar””- Australia has had it’s version of the Equal Pay Act in 1969.
Australian women are still whinging today about not receiving equal pay, even though they all work “from home”, “part time” and “Flexible Working Hours”, without the slightest bit of shame asking for a full wage. It’s an awesome rort if you can get it. Also, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Productivity.

We should always counter the Equal Pay Myth with the capitalist argument. It goes like this:

If women are paid less, then it makes sense for employers to sack every male employee and solely employ women, thus saving the company anywhere between 15%-30% on the wage bill. Productivity of the company involved would of course skyrocket, because women can multitask and men can’t, thus ensuring that everyone can do everyone else’s job without the need of specialization. Women can of course job-share and have their time off minding their children, doing their charity work, pottery classes or whatever else they want because whatever men can do, women can always do it better.

You still haven’t addressed the productivity difference in manual labor which was far and away more prevalent prior to WW2 than it is now.

Example. I lived on the 3rd floor of a 3 floor walkup. The contents of my condo were moved out of it, across town, and then placed in a two story house in 7.5 hours by 5 guys with day old. Why should 5 women get paid the same hourly rate when they can’t do it in the same 7.5 hours.

Is Dalrock falling for Feminist rhetoric? What Slumlord emotively describes as shackled was an arrangement which benefited families and thus women yet burdened men with a lifetime of frequently and usually back-braking work; it was men who might justifiably have felt shackled, as I did when aged fourteen I was taken aside by my father and asked what I was going to do when I left school the following year. I was informed that if I was lucky I might make it to Junior Manager by the time I was sixty. Life worked out somewhat differently but that was Hobson’s miserable choice with which I was presented – so much for male privlege. I addressed the reality of differential wages yesterday on a previous thread [Steve Moxon’s book deals with it in proper detail] so I won’t repeat myself nor will I enlarge upon this entirely mistaken view of history, but I have an anecdote:

Some time after I went out to work, a young woman was accepted as a trainee lawyer, the first one they had had. I felt a little sorry for her, for although she naturally wanted to ingratiate herself with the men, most of the men were married (young marriage in those days) so she clearly did not fit in there, but her attempts to ingratiate herself with the female staff faired even worse, for they saw her as a cheater – someone just like them but who by reason of her ambition luck and position had access to high-value men – indeed a couple of years later she married one such aspiring young male lawyer. The female support staff hated her and were extremely catty. She, however, had a sister who worked for a Sunday paper; this paper was running a series of articles (glossy photos too) of young up and coming professionals and so thanks to her sister’s nepotism she was selected. She was interviewed by the paper and was nicely photographed inn the firm’s library. She had not however sought permission or even informed her employers of what she was about, and worse, what she had said to the interviewer – faithfully recorded in the said colour supplement – rubbished her employers – there’s gratitude albeit honesty for you. Naturally, when the firm discovered what had happened i.e. when they opened their Sunday paper, they were less than amused. It was of course a sacking offence, but was she sacked? No, of course not, that would be cruel to women and men are simply incapable of successfully reprimanding females.

Old movies can be informative: the reality of work for most males circa 1960 (in England) is faithfully reproduced in a film such as the Bryan Forbes scripted The Angry Silence (1960) filmed in Ipswich, a town with row upon row of terraced two-up, two downs; most men working in factories, traveling to their place of employment by bicycle, controlled by their union. Ah the luxury.

According to: Udry, Christopher, et al. “Gender differentials in farm productivity: implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy.” Food policy 20.5 (1995): 407-423. women had lower yields in the studied farming scenarios. This would be a situation where physical strength becomes a factor (not like US farming nowadays with GPS-guided harvesters and the like – machinery being an equalizer).

I have checked the 10 and 20 dollar Australian notes. A man on one side and a woman on the other. I had a couple of 100s in my wallet recently, briefly. Also a lady and a gentleman. The 5 dollar note only has a woman (Her Majesty the Queen).

He can’t prove that IBB as his case is built on assuming the number of hours work directly correspond to the number of hours paid. That is not always true even in hourly positions. It definitely doesn’t translate to the tech field we both work in.

Your ignorance is showing Slumlord.

Someone else said,

I find the process to be fundamentally fair.

No it is not. People discriminate all the time. Many places would actively discriminate against me now since I am a white male. We have just made some discrimination illegal while favoring other discrimination. I would believe you were not discriminating more if you let me pick the food you ate for the next few months, for example. Instead, your own tastes will drive that, not my choices.

Yet we are told someone outside must dictate what a company can and cannot do.

IBB had a valid point in noting that any company that really overlooked cheaper workers would get overrun by another that went after that underserved market segment. It doesn’t happen, which shows that people are not being artificially depressed.

Though some of it is like the parable of the workers in the field. The master chose to pay them all the same wage, even those who only worked a short time. It was his money, but they were jealous. They would probably file a federal lawsuit today! Good thing God is not subject to human laws!

Mariners have it tough, a guy who drank in my local went down in the China Sea with the (Supertanker) Derbyshire: I have the log of a voyage (eighteen thirties) from North America back to Britain of a vessel under the command of Gt Gt Grandpa Opus, where – atrocious weather, amazing they made it back – men are dieing at the rate of about one a day. I was pleased and that the late Steve Martland’s last piece – Sea Shanties – a thirty minute piece for a capella chorus focused on the hard life of the mariner.

Men need incentives; unlike women, men do not look at a successful man and say that because that man is successful that they are being oppressed and deserve the same. As indicated: my father’s ambition for me was very humble albeit white-collar: ambition, yes, but aspiration, no. Compare that with the privileged immigrant Mrs Clooney.

“This would be a situation where physical strength becomes a factor (not like US farming nowadays with GPS-guided harvesters and the like – machinery being an equalizer).”

Growing up in a farm family in the midwest, I’ve never once seen a woman who ran a farming operation, or was even involved in a significant way other than homemaking for a farmer. Physical strength is and will always be incredibly important in farming. You can’t fix the equipment, carry the bags of seed to fill the planter, stack hay bails or get them out of the mow, or a thousand other things without lots of physical strength, or you’d have to have hired hands to do all the grunt work which would eat all your profits.

The efficiency of the newer equipment may actually work the other way — it’s so efficient that one person can run a midsize farming operation practically alone, but only if he’s capable of doing 90% of the possible tasks himself on the spot if need be. My dad farms thousands of acres but he hasn’t had a hiree with significant hours in many years.

I used to work in fisheries management. The dockside is a rough place and nasty stuff is always happening at sea. A fisheries observer went down with a boat and survived, but had a nervous breakdown. Another fisheries manager took an industry job, got unpopular, and was shot at in port.

The skipper of a boat I was observing on joined the vessel drunk, having assaulted a taxi driver. Another boat I was on was eventually run down by a cargo ship.

People never hear about this stuff. It happens at sea and nobody cares. (Except for that Captain Phillips movie, which I must look at.)

It seems that wars between major nations stopped only when the airplane and large bombs ensured that war deaths were evenly distributed between men and women, and elite men were at risk, rather than just lower-class men.

Yes, that seems very likely. It should be pointed out, though, that as long as we consider strictly battle deaths only, the loss ratio of elite men and commoner men were roughly equal. Many British nobles perished in the First World War, for example.

I am from Australia, and I can confirm that the situation was indeed a little different in Australia compared to the US in regards to wage discrimination etc. Until the 1970s minimum wages were lower for women than for men, so it was still legally possible for employers to theoretically pay women less for doing exactly the same job as a man. To what extent this translated into genuine ‘unequal pay for equal work’ is always debatable however. Employers may sometimes have paid women less because they were usually less productive in a given job etc. Moreover, employers will often tolerate lower productivity from workers if they are able to pay them less (you see this with junior wage rates etc.).

I think there is a small kernel of truth to the claim that prior to feminism we had affirmative action for men, at least in areas like the workforce. In many places there was undoubtedly some prevailing belief that it was more important for men to have opportunities and well-paid work etc., as they were more likely to be primary breadwinners. I am sure there were instances in pre-feminist times where mediocre men were promoted and some more intelligent women were held back.

Yet these days we have massive affirmative action in favor of women (schools and universities geared to female needs and hostile to males, unequal reproductive rights, family law bias, workplaces and laws designed to pander to female sensibilities, various women-only services, inducements for companies to hire more women, a media and popular culture that constantly validates female ego and puts down men etc. etc. etc.). But despite all that, women still cannot match it with men among the very highest levels of achievement. That should say something right there.

The notion that all feminism did was unshackle women from artificial constraints, and now women are surging ahead in leaps and bounds all on their own merit, is nonsense. The truth is that feminism has done its best to rig nearly everything in women’s favor, yet many women manage to screw things up nonetheless.

“And there is nothing magical about Australian women. They are pretty much like American women in their achievements. Or rather less impressive probably”.

It may interest readers here that for several census in a row, exogamy (marriage outside of one’s ethnic group) has accounted for the bulk of marriages in Australia. The short answer: Anglo Saxon men marry Asian women far more than they do Anglo Saxon women, of whom one in four will never marry.

This should normally be a signal to Anglo women to ask “What’s wrong? Why?” but instead they resort to the classic feminist chant: “The Men Marry Asian Women Because they’re More Submissive”!

Probably what happened since the 80s is that the average white man’s productivity and wages have lagged. This is of course the period when America’s manufacturing base was destroyed, and agriculture was consolidated. It’s also the era of big government, when teaching elementary school became an upper class lifestyle.

Minimum Wage laws only two 2 things: 1) No economic effect, but operate as an anti-exploitation law [as they are well under the Wage Floor of the economy] or 2) specifically limit the supply available workers, but raising costs [as the Minimum is now above the Wage Floor].

Raising Minimum Wage by law would strike me not as “unshackling” but as intentional discrimination to limit the amount of Women that worked in certain fields.

And, thanks to MarcusD, it turns out I was thinking wrong on the strength difference between Men & Women: it’s 4 Standard Deviations, not 3. (Not that the .02% difference is functionally meaningful in all but certain forms of statistically analysis.)

Are you sure, Spike? I haven’t noticed that. But I only have my personal experience to go on. Men who marry Asian women here are sometimes considered to be “losers”. That said, some of the Vietnamese girls are very tempting, especially for Catholic men wanting to marry inside their faith. I saw a pairing like that, I think it was, on Facebook recently.

What I meant when I said that Australian women seem to be less impressive in the career area was that they don’t seem to be quite as driven to achievement as many American women. There are probably various reasons for this, but one is simply the greater social conservatism of Australians in general, and a feminist movement that has shallower and less wide-spread roots.

A lot of feminist ideas here are clearly imported from America and the jargon used tends to be the same. Some of them “take”; others do not. Affirmative action has mostly been in the latter category. It may simply go against Australian values of the “fair go” and “fair play”.

On the topic of “unshackling”, I have long had the impression that female achievement is in fact the “dog that didn’t bark”. Despite comparative freedom, especially recently, women mostly follow traditional life paths. There is nothing stopping women doing STEM or whatever, but they choose not to or are not very good at those subjects. Feminists find this deeply frustrating and blame everything and everybody. Except their fellow women of course.

On the other hand, I worked with many women in my decades in the Australian Public Service. Since I tended to do jobs with a biological side, many women were interested. On the whole they were about as good as the men. However if I had been doing civil engineering, for example, I expect my experience would have been different.

If women are paid less, then it makes sense for employers to sack every male employee and solely employ women, thus saving the company anywhere between 15%-30% on the wage bill.

Economics is not a stand alone operation, it’s actually a second order phenomenon whose efficiency is dependent on cultural factors. Given the strong place of sexual roles in the past, many women could not, for cultural reasons, access jobs, nor would employers hire them because of social stigma. Secondly, the trade unions in many instances fought, as Julian mentioned, to keep women out of certain occupations.

In areas where men and women were both able to work, such as teaching, women were paid less.

Oh and let me tell you another story about Australia being a small economy with a shortage of jobs.

One of the first jobs my father got in this country was at Massey Fergusons’s ( a firm which was later bought up a U.S. company, which was a competitor, and shut it down.) There was so much work available–shortage of workers– that when dad arrived workers were being paid bonuses if they could bring other workers to come and work there. Post WWII till the mid 70’s there was work here galore.

@julian

The size of the economy is pretty irrelevant the question is how much employment can it absorb. The productivity of capital is the real issue. Here are the GDP per capita figures from 1900.
We were bigger than the Yanks on this metric. Australian wages were deliberately set based on the arbitration system strongly influenced by the Harvester case (Massey Ferguson, where my dad worked!) and from the outset a wage differential was set in place. Incidentally, I wasn’t really aware how influential Rerum Novarum was on the Judicial decision making.

The issue here is not how many women worked, many of the women who worked did so out of necessity. Sick husbands, widowed post war,lots of children, single etc. The question is was it fair to pay them less for the same type of work?

And Brad A, because I’m full of love, something special for you!

Here’s an interesting paper looking at productivity of women in blue collar jobs.

I don’t expect that women will ever earn more than men as a group, as we tend to prioritize differently when making our career choices and have the option of marrying a man who earns more. I would like to know if women are still paid less than men in the same field for doing the same work. This hasn’t been my experience but a lot of women claim to have experienced this.

Slumlord, I assume you are not disputing my point that social expectations at the time led the arbitration commissions and the like to set or permit a lower wage for women on the assumption (true in the majority of cases) that men were the breadwinners.

It is interesting that the unions were part of this arrangement and it was part of the overall “social contract” in place at the time.

I am not an economist (nor am I an industrial lawyer, although oddly enough that was my father’s profession – Raymond O’Dea “Industrial Relations in Australia”) – but I am pretty confident that paying women less was intended to allow the employment of more breadwinning men with dependent wives and families.

The issue I take with Slumlord’s position is that women have leaped ahead in the English-speaking world, particularly in the US and UK, due to official and cultural acts of discrimination in their favor combined with the loosening of sexual morality. A few points to consider:

1. Many businesses and government agencies actively recruit women with skill sets that would be ordinary in a man.
2. Many of those same organizations are willing to fast track women into senior and leadership positions. One of my previous employers specifically had a program for grooming women to quickly enter the executive ranks and I know they’re not unusual where I live.
3. Birth control and abortion have made it possible for women to actually have their cake and eat it too. From a traditional Christian POV, you could easily argue that the path to women’s position in the workplace has been paved with immorality because we know that the vast majority of these women are neither celibate nor engaging in NFP.

And #4, which is specific to the US, the federal government and probably most states, actively discriminates in favor of female-owned businesses in contracting. Female-owned businesses are qualified to be labeled 8a privileged vendors which means that they are part of a small class of businesses that can bid on many small contracts and can force large businesses to partner with them on bigger ones.

Paying a woman less for the same work is wrong, but it’s ridiculous to claim that we got to where we are now just by the sweat of their brow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

He also pointed out how many men are irresponsible today, but the fact is that there is no good reason for most men to try the traditional provider route. Even if they don’t consciously acknowledge it, most have seen enough such men in their lives get ruined capriciously by hostile courts to avoid that.

Personally I am grateful that my wife earns equal pay to men in the Australian Public Service. It has allowed me to retire on my pension and have it supplemented by my wife’s earnings so that I have time to chat here and be a “gentleman of leisure”.

On the other hand, she works as a librarian or archivist, so her choice to go into a relatively moderately paid female profession is also in play.

“In 2006, women did two-thirds of all household work while men did two-thirds of paid work. The total workload was even, each sex spending 50 hours a week on paid and household work. While men are doing more household work than in the past, in 2006 women still did nearly twice as much as men.”

I meant that the legal process under which your claim of discrimination would be determined is one that allows both you and the employer to make your case fairly. The law forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. It doesn’t favor any wage discrimination. The only thing that favors discrimination against men is the view, now commonly held by women, that it is impossible for any man to exceed any woman in anything other than oppressing others. That is not the fault of lawmakers who created current equal pay laws or of the courts, nor can it be changed by altering the standards for liability in those cases. Your example about food is bizarre, and I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.

2. Many of those same organizations are willing to fast track women into senior and leadership positions. One of my previous employers specifically had a program for grooming women to quickly enter the executive ranks and I know they’re not unusual where I live.

Amen.

I attend regional meetings with execs of my company where there is an HR presentation and, for the past 5-10 years, one of the top HR priorities, quite openly, has been recruiting and advancing women. Of course this comes at the expense of men. This is never stated, but it’s obvious because there are zer sums involved. There are thumbs on scales – many of them – and it’s quite open.

To conclude from the results of these thumbs on the scales that women are outperforming men because they naturally will do so when the so-called “shackles” are removed is simply to distort reality. If you promote something, it will get advanced – such is the case with women today. And the situation of men is an afterthought, because there are still enough naturally motivated and ambitious men to occupy the corner offices – which is what is noticed. The rest of the guys can get fucked, and people like SL denigrate them as being unable to compete effectively when the thumbs are on the scales against them. It’s disgusting.

SL, do you have a son? Honest question, to which I do not know the answer.

I meant that the legal process under which your claim of discrimination would be determined is one that allows both you and the employer to make your case fairly. The law forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. It doesn’t favor any wage discrimination. The only thing that favors discrimination against men is the view, now commonly held by women, that it is impossible for any man to exceed any woman in anything other than oppressing others. That is not the fault of lawmakers who created current equal pay laws or of the courts, nor can it be changed by altering the standards for liability in those cases. Your example about food is bizarre, and I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.

I am arguing that the law is inherently unfair, so the current system is not just. A woman could not make a voluntary arrangement to work for less pay, for example, because the organization would face the risk of her later suing them for discrimination, as one example.

A company should be able to do as it wishes, as should I and everyone else in this case. Enforcing social mores like this with laws is ultimately ineffective and is immoral.

My point about food has two parts. It highlights that you do discriminate and would not want me to control that. It also has the hidden message that once we allow government to control discrimination we end up with idiotic laws doing just that. Remember the ban on biggie drinks in NYC? (Is that still active?)

Government is not a holy thing to worship as you do, it is a thing to often be opposed. It has very narrow legitimate scope, well below where it is today. That is the point you need to ponder.

It is relevant here because the same laws that push for equal pay also push many of the other flawed efforts that ruin men’s lives today.

mmaier2112: “Women might EARN more than men. That hardly means they OUT-PRODUCE men. Go into any medical establishment. Every time I do, I see dozens of females sitting around talking. Not working. The amount of women among whom I need to shuffle my papers is sickening.”

I’ve read dozens of articles over the past couple of decades stating that today’s “young employees” place greater importance on “workplace satisfaction” than on wages. Rather than more money, they prefer a fun, supportive working environment. On-site amenities such as a workplace gym, game room, spa, etc. A flexible work schedule, rather than a rigid 9-to-5. Options to work from home. Generous time off for family and personal matters.

I suppose this is all part of the feminization of the workplace. Some articles will admit this, and say that women are making the workplace “more humane,” and improving the workplace for both men and women.

Of course, these Disneyland worksites are mostly found in lucrative high-tech and entertainment companies. (And maybe for some academics and government employees?) Businesses that must compete against low-wage foreign workers can’t really afford to turn the workplace into an amusement park for employees.

From what I have seen in my life, there are multiple causes for the male/female pay gap. An important one is that some jobs require a certain amount of brains AND require that the employee work outside in foul weather, or travel extensively. Women with the brains to perform these jobs can generally find an indoor job that they prefer overall, even if it doesn’t pay as well.

I’ve come across numerous men during the course of my life who have told me that to get started at a decent wage they moved geographically and lived in their car for a month or so until they had received a couple of paychecks and could afford to get an apartment in their new town. I have NEVER had a female relate a similar experience. A woman might relocate if she has a relative living in the new town, or if she is offered a “relocation package” but women will not leave everything behind and camp out in their cars, etc. Obviously, a young woman living in her car is a very, very bad idea.

Similarly, to get your foot in the door at some high-wage workplaces you have to start off with the night shift in a very scary neighborhood. Men are far more willing to do this, and they are also more willing to put up with a really long commute.

I remember having a conversation with female co-workers back in the mid to late 70s, and some of the older women said that men who changed jobs seemed to be much better able to “step up” to a better position with higher pay based on their prior work experience, while women who moved to a new company nearly always had to start at the bottom. I don’t doubt that there was some truth to this in the 1970s, and maybe this still goes on. The economy is so rotten at this point that a lot of people seem to be making lateral moves or stepping back, just to stay in the workforce.

For married couples with children, the woman is usually less willing/able to work overtime or to accept a transfer to another part of the country. Teaching and nursing were always “women’s careers” because they offered women a better work/life balance. There are many reasons why women have traditionally earned less than men, and the biggest of these was always that women typically entered and exited paid employment multiple times in their 20s and 30s as they got married, relocated based on their husbands’ careers, and took time off with small children. Wages are now so depressed, and child care costs so high, that I really don’t see the point of young women with children working. I’m convinced that few of them are actually profitting from burning the candle at both ends, and it is certainly a lifestyle that often leads to divorce..

@Opus: If your father intended you to leave school at fifteen, how did you end up as an attorney?

Given the strong place of sexual roles in the past, many women could not, for cultural reasons, access jobs, nor would employers hire them because of social stigma.

That is not relevant. You are arguing women were paid less than men for the same hours. While I will grant that may have been on paper, it failed to take into account many other factors in most of the cases.

You did not address issues like the need for more flexibility, unwillingness to spend significant overtime, etc. You are still avoiding that, as most of the studies and columns in this area do.

Or did you address IBB’s point and I just missed it?

The issue here is not how many women worked, many of the women who worked did so out of necessity. Sick husbands, widowed post war,lots of children, single etc. The question is was it fair to pay them less for the same type of work?

You still have not proven that they were ultimately paid less. A competitor could open up shop and clean house if this large pool of underpaid women existed. They wouldn’t even have to bring women to full equity, just pay them part of the difference. That did not happen.

You also claimed earlier that women could not be employed as the reason for the reason this didn’t happen, yet women were employed, so your argument fails because they were already employed. Nothing prevented a business full of workers making more money due to being more cost effective.

The PDF you linked is irrelevant. I have not read the whole thing, but I have looked enough into the topic to know that their opening statement is false:

There is no question there is a gender wage gap:

Note that they say “gap” rather than “difference.” This is a rhetorical term used to swing the argument away from even examining that it is different for valid reasons. A gap is a bad thing and must be fixed! Pay no attention to other factors, including a desire for more flexibility, etc.

You are doubling down, over and over, and not answering the objections.

I don’t expect that women will ever earn more than men as a group, as we tend to prioritize differently when making our career choices and have the option of marrying a man who earns more. I would like to know if women are still paid less than men in the same field for doing the same work. This hasn’t been my experience but a lot of women claim to have experienced this.

You answer your own question Michelle, priorities differ. That can even happen in the same field, not just between fields. I would bet most of the women you know who claim this discrimination don’t factor in other things. They may not even need the same accommodations now they did in the past and thus think they are willing to work just as much as any man, forgetting that current status is built on past status in many cases. A low salary can easily follow you around, unless you are willing to take a dramatic leap, something that involves a lot more risk. How many women are willing to do that?

Other than the special cases of (e.g.) widows and health problems — and, as always, hard cases make bad law — a healthy society should and will discriminate in favor of men in the workplace and women in the home. A society that does not do this is perverse and diseased.

What gets me about Slumlord’s position is that you see affirmative action for women everywhere. You see society turning itself on its head over women not being 50-51% of the STEM professionals. You see violence against women being regarded as the “worstest thing evah” to the point that pointing out female domestic violence gets you shrieked down (not shouted down) as a misogynist who is of a kind with Elliot Rodger. Society is, in the areas that count, obsessed with the status of women.

Besides the people actively trying to inflict disease upon society? Not many. As always, the reason to care when you shouldn’t normally is you see the SJWs running around with cans of gasoline in one hand and lit matches in the other.

Slumlord also ignores the corresponding “affirmative action” — the traditional social support for women qua homemakers which always made it easier for women (along any number of dimensions) to be homemakers, even though many men might have better skills, empathy, etc in particular circumstances — especially given the fact that so many modern women have deliberately made themselves domestically useless.

Don’t make the mistake of buying into the modernist frame. There will always be “affirmative action” for men qua breadwinners and women qua homemakers in any healthy society. Buying into the notion that these natural and healthy social biases are “affirmative action” is to have already accepted the modern frame on relations between the sexes.

Long story, nevertheless that was the idea: the school leaving age was fifteen and it was known that I was terminally thick (which was why I had been removed from a number of classes – thus ensuring that I too believed in my own stupidity even as it curtailed certain possibilities that interested me) but I was at a fee-paying boarding-school which meant that my parents had to be out of the top-drawer and that was what (they assumed) would secure me a back-room office job. As I say ambition without aspiration.

My parents attitude towards my sister however was however quite different. She was prevented from going to one of the better Public schools [that is to say fee-paying – the term has the opposite meaning to your American use of the term] in the country (my Mother’s and her late Aunt’s old school) because my father did not want his daughter to be away from home and thus from him (quasi-incestuousness of course). She was to go to University (to read Economics – my Father”s choice of subject, so that joining a major corporation would be possible, and indeed that was what she did) because the man she might marry might be a loser or turn to drink or lose his job and thus be unable to support her financially. In short a typical example of a Trad-Con singing from the feminist hymn-sheet.

I only mention this as Slumlord’s parody of shackled women and privileged men is just that.

Men were paid more because they had the legal,social and moral obligation to financially support their wife and children. Women on the other hand were under no such obligation. Women who worked outside of the home were actually depriving some men of supporting their families. How many men in the past could not afford to start a family because some women was taking the bread out of their mouths?

Money is not the be-all of everything. My father had a high salary but along with the £££ came ulcers, mysterious symtoms that baffled the doctors and migraines that saw him confined to a pitch dark bedroom the entire weekend and eventually the stomach cancer that killed him at 51.
There is a reason some jobs pay a high salary but feminists and women can only see the $$$!

The real wage gap is 98 cents per dollar – within the margin of error. Women who perform the same work are paid the same as men adjusting for all else. There was probably discrimination previously – its gone and replaced with affirmative action and women do just the same as men.

The average woman is fit for an average job. Above average women are naturally very good at many things including a bunch of very high paying jobs like medicine. More women are already becoming doctors relative to men.

I think it would be nice to get rid of the affirmative action favoring women and without shackles let them perform on their own.

“It couldn’t possibly be that they’re just better suited to those tasks.”

Our Maker endowed us as men with the testosterone that enables us to create, procreate and annihilate when the time comes for us to do those things. Part of the motivation of radical Feminism is Penis Envy; as the saying goes, they hate us because they ain’t us. That’s why they cackle with glee on their daytime talk shows when one of us gets castrated.

Other than the special cases of (e.g.) widows and health problems — and, as always, hard cases make bad law — a healthy society should and will discriminate in favor of men in the workplace and women in the home. A society that does not do this is perverse and diseased.

This.

I’m sure you’re aware, of course, that this sentiment is the epitome of unPC prohibited speech, and that on any other site than this one and a handful of others, even within the ‘sphere, you would already have been the victim of a digital lynching, complete with digital gasoline and matches. In some countries you would even have cops kicking down your door.

How many men in the past could not afford to start a family because some women was taking the bread out of their mouths?

“In the past?” Why the use of the past tense? How many men today can’t afford to start families because of out-of-control AA for women (aided and abetted by a deliberate de-industrialization effort and slow, unrelenting monetary inflation)?

And the beat goes on – “Felicity Reynolds, CEO of the Mercy Foundation says that while the numbers of homeless older women only represent “six to eight per cent of the total number of people counted as homeless in Australia,” we need to pay attention because this “is a problem that we appear to be at the very beginning of.”

“This should be setting off alarm bells for the policy makers because this is only going to get worse as affordability gets worse,” she says.”

Ha! My father was also a “Trad-Con singing from the feminist hymn-sheet.” My elder sister remembers him telling her that “a man can always get a decent-paying job doing something or other, but women without educations get trapped in jobs that don’t pay anything.” He, too, feared the possibility of a ne’er-do-well son-in-law.

Obviously, you were a classic late bloomer. Perhaps the threat of working 40 years to become a Junior Manager spurred you on to academic excellence in what otherwise would have been your final year at school.

The first few biographies of pre-war Brits that I read astonished me — back then it really was possible for someone to have a very interesting career in a number of different fields despite having left school between the ages of 15 to 18. David Niven was a between-the-wars Army officer at 18; Anthony Eden’s younger brother was a Naval officer at 16 (died at Jutland at age 16/17). It wasn’t entirely clear to me, but apparently during WWI, boys at Eton left school when older male relatives were able to arrange an opportunity to be a junior officer in a desirable regiment. There didn’t seem to be any concern about “graduating” from Eton, much less any idea that they couldn’t get on in life without a university education. In America, it used to be possible for men to learn to do engineering work through on-the-job training.

Nowadays you need some kind of diploma just to get a dead-end office job AND you are years older by the time you get started AND have a level of debt that would have terrified an earlier generation. The years when the kids have the greatest ambition and the highest energy level are being wasted to a large extent.

@TFH regarding your argument that men pay into the system and women take out of the system. This is painting with a broad brush. I am unemployed and attend a DWP office fortnightly and I can tell you that 90% of the Job seekers Allowance claimants are men. Curiously about 85% of the white collar positions at the DWP are occupied by women and 100% of the security people are men.
I like to think of this office being representative of the GB economy as a whole. That is men unemployed or in low paid work and women employed in respectable and fairly respectable jobs.

As the title suggests, it’s a critique of Hanna Rosin’s “End of Men” article. It’s detailed and makes a persuasive case that men aren’t falling behind women in the way that Rosin and “Slumlord” claim they are.

If you want to argue that the free market does a better job penalizing discrimination or that wage discrimination is beyond the scope of government authority, then we can have an intelligent discussion about it. But to compare a provision which merely forbids wage discrimination when it is solely on the basis of biological traits to an Orwellian food police scenario or accuse me of government “worship” is asinine.

An employer may discriminate against a man as well as it might against a woman. My original post outlined one reason why it might do so, but there are others. Current law provides a remedy for a person in that situation only when he can prove that people doing the same work under the same conditions are being paid at different rates and when the employer is unable to show that it’s pay scale is anything other than “rate x for penises and rate y for vaginas”.

A free market without any prohibition of wage discrimination would provide these individuals with the ability to work cheaper, go somewhere else, or start a competing business, but would provide no other remedy. For as long as the paid workforce has existed, people have used any collective power any group of them could get to restrict market competition, whether through trade unions, licensing laws, unbalanced taxes on imports and exports, price caps, minimum wages, and so forth. Today they’re using vague rhetoric about “diversity” and baseless, public accusations of racism or misogyny, amplified through a sympathetic media, to the same end.

The U.S. Constitution vests the Congress with authority to regulate interstate commerce. Federal prohibition of wage discrimination is one way that Congress can attempt to prevent the aforementioned hindrances to free competition from being carried out under the protection of state authority. There are, of course other ways government could go about this same goal, but you haven’t suggested any. I’m left to wonder what exactly you would prefer.

In the UK around the 50’s-60’s not many women worked full time and the kind of jobs they did
were neither fufilling nor necessary to the nation as a whole.They could have one job before lunch and leave and have another job in the afternoon.It was more social but kept the wheels turning at
home to allow for outings etc.The male,by contrast did not have the same options.If he were married he had to keep working and that extra that he earned over female wages was to keep his family.It’s apples and oranges time again.
What finally bought the chickens home to roost was the mortgaes on homes offered after the 1949 sitting tenants act which gave renters the chance to buy their own house.Unions had fought successfully for male rates but when women entered the market they undercut the union rate much to the amusement of the 1% and from the 70’s on womens wages mattered since men started to lose jobs which were male in nature in favour of a typing pool ideology.Great big miners with huge paws were trying to type bossed about by some kid of a female half their age.

Opus says:
June 23, 2015 at 1:58 am.. it was men who might justifiably have felt shackled, as I did when aged fourteen I was taken aside by my father and asked what I was going to do when I left school the following year. I was informed that if I was lucky I might make it to Junior Manager by the time I was sixty … so much for male privlege.

Indeed! Well said, the entire comment, and thank you for sharing. I too remember the good ole “shackled” days. Women have always had it easier then men.

The question is was it fair to pay them less for the same type of work?

And the answer is YES, unless they can produce like men can. I have yet to see it except in rare individuals. Furthermore, NO ONE has presented any evidence that women do produce as well as men. Women are NOT men, and societies should not artificially prop up women so they can play like they’re men.

As I recall, according to BLS data, single college-educated woman were already earning more than single, college-educated men by 1971. The discrimination theory of the male/female wage disparity never explains why all this institutional discrimination against woman affected married college-educated women, but not single, college educated woman.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I’ve had jobs working with just men. I’ve had jobs working with only women besides myself. I’ve had jobs working with half and half. The presence of women stalls out productivity because women are different, and you cannot treat them like men. This causes confusion. It also creates perverse incentives for abuse of the systems (pay, discipline, camaraderie…everything); by both men and women. Period.

As I understand it the purpose of the employment discrimination was to protect the structure of the family and prevent the feral female syndrome we have today. It may seem unfair to those who see society as a simple aggregation of individuals, but to those who see the primacy of the family over the individual the discrimination was prudent and appropriate. I give modernity as exhibit one of what happens when primacy is given to the individual over the family.

If you want to argue that the free market does a better job penalizing discrimination or that wage discrimination is beyond the scope of government authority, then we can have an intelligent discussion about it. But to compare a provision which merely forbids wage discrimination when it is solely on the basis of biological traits to an Orwellian food police scenario or accuse me of government “worship” is asinine.

The effect of “equal pay for equal work” legislation is to ensure that fewer women get hired in the first place. It’s a terrible policy that accomplishes the exact opposite of what it intends.

If a woman truly is paid less due to discrimination, the only weapon she has against a “sexist” employer is to offer to work for less. If a sexist employer is required by law to pay women the same as men, then his choice becomes very simple: hire only men. There’s a great video by Milton Friedman on the topic. Google “equal pay for equal work + Milton Friedman”, I highly recommend you watch it.

As I understand it the purpose of the employment discrimination was to protect the structure of the family and prevent the feral female syndrome we have today. It may seem unfair to those who see society as a simple aggregation of individuals, but to those who see the primacy of the family over the individual the discrimination was prudent and appropriate. I give modernity as exhibit one of what happens when primacy is given to the individual over the family.

I agree, but the premise is that it isn’t fair to do it that way, it offends natural justice, and it needs to be disestablished because ideas.

This is like saying that St. Paul offends natural justice, which quite honestly not a n leftie Christians claim either directly (“I follow Christ and not Paul”) or indirectly (“Paul’s writings were extremely contextual and don’t apply today”). But eventually you are basically decoupling from Paul. Yes, yes, one can argue that this isn’t what it is because I believe in roles and submission and so on, but at the end of the day if you don’t support the social mores that underlie those (which included not trumpeting the drive for the brass ring by women, as we relentlessly do today), then you don’t really support the idea. It’s not something you can have both ways.

Some men, perhaps SL, find women who are of the “super friends” variety hot. I do not. I suspect that lurks at the bottom of this discussion.

As I understand it the purpose of the employment discrimination was to protect the structure of the family and prevent the feral female syndrome we have today.

Sounds noble, but I don’t believe it. If Dalrock’s numbers are right, then the “family-man pay-plan” should have went away shortly after 1963. It didn’t. I think women were paid less because:

1) They would accept it.
2) They often weren’t as productive individually
3) They cost more in ways that are obvious, but hard to state; workplace disruption (bathrooms, health, etc.); unquenchable dissatisfaction; dealing with husbands; flirting/fornication/adultery; favoritism; crying…

You argued that the current system allows everyone to make the case fairly. My argument is that this is not true as it is biased in favor of women. It is also immoral to boot.

Controlling what a company does in one case allows it to control what it does in other cases. That is why we now have a system where it is “guilty until proven innocent.” That is unjust, but a necessary consequence of government meddling. You trust government to fix things, I do not.

A free market without any prohibition of wage discrimination would provide these individuals with the ability to work cheaper, go somewhere else, or start a competing business, but would provide no other remedy.

So? That could be said to justify making many things illegal. It is in fact and it is one of the reasons we have so many laws and everyone is a guilty today of something. Let people go elsewhere for jobs. Let them control themselves. If an owner wants to pay one sex more, let them do so. A solid case can be made that allowing a man to make more helps a society be more solid, rather than the mess we have now, but that does not have to be either encouraged or allowed. Just clear the government out of the role of who can get into business and you would have far more equity than you have now.

Instead you have gatekeepers deciding who wins and loses, with a huge bias toward females. That is far from just, yet it is what you love.

For as long as the paid workforce has existed, people have used any collective power any group of them could get to restrict market competition, whether through trade unions, licensing laws, unbalanced taxes on imports and exports, price caps, minimum wages, and so forth.

Wrong. They have attempted to do that and have had varying levels of success, but they were not always successful. Such should be opposed and true freedom sought rather than rejoicing at socialism and similar controls.

The U.S. Constitution vests the Congress with authority to regulate interstate commerce. Federal prohibition of wage discrimination is one way that Congress can attempt to prevent the aforementioned hindrances to free competition from being carried out under the protection of state authority. There are, of course other ways government could go about this same goal, but you haven’t suggested any. I’m left to wonder what exactly you would prefer.

A store selling locally produced milk, for example, is not participating in interstate commerce. Many things have slid under that guise that are abhorrent to its principles. It is long since dead and lets just be honest, you have no problem with a ruling elite telling everyone what they must do and how they must behave, with the huge bureaucracy to back it up. The latter has to steal lots of money from many hard workers to keep going, but that is fine with you because a few people seem to be helped. I say it is immoral and a key part of the feminist control we are discussing in this thread.

A powerful state is needed to choke both enforce feminism and choke freedom. I think I would take the risks of a truly free market over the mess we have today. I refuse to worship it as you do.

Notice how, despite the underlying facts, most articles above that acknowledge women are less productive when it comes to X, there’s always a mangina like you spinning this as “men are still worse like this!” and other such nonsense. Could it be that women are simply more expensive to employ, not just from a medical standpoint, but from a drama standpoint? Naw, that couldn’t be. These awful men need to just accept more indignities and injustices so women can have parity with men once and for all, right?

The value if gold is not only the value of the labor of the men extracting it, but also the labor of the men that tried and found nothing.

That increased wage a man makes is also paid out to the man that dies in the trenches, the fields, the seas, or the mines. That is his share of the wealth. Women are quite satisfied to skip pay equality when it comes to the painful and often lethal social cost a man has to pay. That pay gap is one they are willing to let stand.

JDG says:
No they aren’t. They are egalitarian which is feminism under a different name. Their model still denigrates fathers as mothers still have the final say rather than dad (who should have it according to scripture).

If you listen to the link, she criticized mothers for undermining fathers’ leadership. And even though it was a woman saying it, the men approved & broadcast it.

Feminists are telling us changing the law didn’t make a difference. I’m inclined to believe them.

I can’t believe that you are using the same “logic” to shore up your argument as the feminists do. See, by interpreting that data in exactly the same way that the feminists are, you’re basically agreeing that women in contemporary America are financially discriminated against in paid employment. You’re feeding the beast. Another conservative shooting the Right in the head.

The business owner himself could have not only perpetuated the myth but believed in the myth.

So, I provide you with objective data, and I have the independent witness of Johhnycomelately, and what I’m pushing is a “myth!”. Welcome to the world of reality denial.

The more intelligent commentators on this thread, have acknowledged that discrimination was rampant but it was done in order to promote a social good. (i.e maintaining the husband as financial head of the family). Now, I disagree that this was the best way to go about this, but at least they’re not denying reality.

Whilst I was asleep ( Brad A, I live on the other side of the world, there’s a 12-15 hour time zone difference), it was interesting to see how this thread developed. There was talk about anti-depressant use, the hardships of men in the workplace, affirmative action for women, the horrors of war and anecdotes galore. Not much logic or argument but a lot of Serial Associative Cognition. Brad A, I suggest you have a read.

It is unhelpful with regard to the debate.

Now in order to help the retarded I thought I might recap a bit.

The propositions I put forward are:

1) That women were financially discriminated against in the past.
(There is ample empirical evidence that this is true.)

2) That women are outperforming men in contemporary society.
(and depending on the metrics used there is evidence of this as well)

I did not say:

1) I support feminism.
2) Affirmative action is just.
3) That the duties of the traditional male were easy.
4) I said nothing at all about anti-depressant use. (WTF?)

Finally, I did also say that I felt that there was a failure of masculinity. In a population which is approximately 50% men and 50% women, Women Now Rule, (with compliance of a nation of Eunuchs) They control everything, the courts, the governments, affirmative action, what goes on in the bedroom, the awarding of grants, the nature of childrearing, even the tone of most religions. If you want proof of the failure of masculinity, look around you.

Growing up in a farm family in the midwest, I’ve never once seen a woman who ran a farming operation, or was even involved in a significant way other than homemaking for a farmer. Physical strength is and will always be incredibly important in farming. You can’t fix the equipment, carry the bags of seed to fill the planter, stack hay bails or get them out of the mow, or a thousand other things without lots of physical
This is the problem. Woman have a job that we can do. Wife. But we don’t want it. Paul Washer said a godly wife is an asset. I like my iphone but I wish could have a been SAHM by 25.
I am not an ecomicst but if spend less than you bring in you’re good

Haha, Slumlord, masculinity has been destroyed by your rise of women. There is no masculinity anymore. All your above points have time and again been discussed. In a Democracy, when women vote and obtain majority, they will destroy society from the inside out, with the help of mangina men, there is nothing that can stop this. As TFH has said numerous times. Women will always vote for what’s in their best short-term interest, no matter the cost to their men, children or future. It does not matter.

Women are currently the only gender really trying to prop up the current shit, men are slowly but surely waking up and walking away. The rest is propped up by huge amounts of debts, low interest rates and Central Bank control over markets. Thus it looks like more women are achieving but in reality they are merely fighting over scraps from an overturned table. In other words, the vast majority of your super women have been hoodwinked out of family and motherhood and a less stressful and more rewarding life. They are indeed smart!

You miss the vital point. There is no point in men trying anymore. It’s a rigged game. Their masculinity means nothing. Your metrics for measuring success are based on what worked 20 or more years ago. They don’t work anymore, not for the majority of the male population.

Anyway, I welcome women to work themselves to death. I applaud more homeless women, more women being killed in combat and in the work place. It’s about time they enjoy the privileges of being expendable.

If Slumlord is correct, women should have risen easily and sooner. If they are indeed superior to men, they should be inventing, discovering, building, documenting, designing, not complaining about a wage-gap myth. Hell, why don’t these super geniuses just create their own companies and research centers and only hire women. Why do they need men at all?

When you boil it down, it is easy for a society to control either sex. They just mindfuck them at school. And which sex is being drugged into oblivion, I wonder?! The ability of women to indeed be superior to men on a equal playing field ended the day schools and universities started to cater to women and severely handicap men. Men don’t learn or achieve when they are taught like women. Instead they rebel and are drugged or punished until they submit.

And finally, the reason why women entering the workforce means men leave the workforce. It’s so simple. When women enter they demand everything be changed to their liking. Eventually everything is and men can no longer act or be men, thus masculinity is crushed by gynocentrism and men leave to go achieve somewhere else where they can be men again.

It’s all so simple, yet vitally important. If women enter male spaces, they destroy them and the society that men create, which is why they were kept out..

And I’m done, if Slumcunt can’t get that simplicity he can join the chorus of manginas singing about glorious vajayjays. Woooohoooo!

Slumlord1) That women were financially discriminated against in the past.

I don’t see anyone disputing that, but you do dance with your strawmen divinely. You offered that irrelevancy as “proof” of your absurd “women are rising now that the shackles are off of them”, and the answer is “so what?”.

2) That women are outperforming men in contemporary society.
(and depending on the metrics used there is evidence of this as well)

Sure, because the game in modern society is rigged in favor of women. If I choose to play poker with a marked deck of cards and I clean up every pot, does that make me a better card player?
If I decide to race Usain Bolt in the 50 meter dash but require that he has to wear 10 kilo weights on each foot so that I win, have I really “outperformed” him? You should argue “yes”, that winning a rigged card game or racing an Olympic athlete who has a huge handicap is indeed “outperforming” – if you are logically consistent, of course.

Women are given special privileges in every way in the Anglosphere, from women-only computing camps for high school students to women-only scholarships to college to feminized primary and secondary education to special women only small business loans to special women-only government contracts and on and on and on. None of this is apparently visible to you, in your pedestalization of “Wonderful Women”.

And furthermore, Slumlord, my opinion of you is dropping by the day with your continued refusal to address the claim regarding divorce in your “neck of the woods”, i.e. Australia. Your government clearly states that there are reasons for divorce in Australia, therefore your claim is false and you’d have to be astoundingly ignorant to not know that. I do not believe that you are that ignorant. Therefore, what is left? Either you wrote a hasty, stupid statement, or you deliberately wrote a falsehood – either way, it’s time for you to man up and face what your own words clearly say. If credibility matters, that is.

Feminists are telling us changing the law didn’t make a difference. I’m inclined to believe them.

Exactly. I think that was one of your points that was missed. There was no “affirmative action” for men by a “pay-wage gap”. There may be a gap, but it wasn’t because businesses were expressing a form of noblesse oblige. To do so would have been a failure anyway (in the same way minimum wages fail).

However; it would have been pretty good at discouraging women from entryism and jacking with the program at work. That’s a good enough reason. It really is.

I’ve been working with a group of eight women. One 30yo was made redundant because she’s gone crazy. Her father had to come move her home for her own safety. Another just got married, and then pregnant. (I’ve encouraged her to forget work and raise that baby, like a real woman.) Another works from home in a state without an office because she was banging an executive until they “broke up”. Now the company is just trying to keep her content.

On the previous thread, Slumlord made this claim:I’m of the opinion that traditional society had several weak-points which the left were able to exploit. One of them was “hypergamic affirmative action”, i.e. men were artificially elevated in status above their competence and women were artificially pulled down. It was a society that offended natural justice.

The only evidence in support of this claim, i.e. that men were artificially elevated over women, is the purely financial issue of pay. It is mighty interesting that you would reduce relations between men and women to money and nothing more.

And you have offered nothing in support of the claim that “it was a society that offended natural justice”. Furthermore, you have repeatedly refused to engage the obvious ways in which the current society offends natural justice.

Slumlord, for the third time: is it just to drug 6 year old boys because they won’t act like 6 year old girls?

SlumlordStatistical data definitely shows that women initiate most divorces but it’s a conflation error to assume that just because a woman initiates divorce she is responsible for the underlying marital disharmony.

Reposting from the previous thread so that you cannot falsely claim to have “not seen” this:

This would appear to contradict your own observations of a few years back based on the GISS data, i.e. that the number of sexual partners a woman has prior to marriage correlates positively with the probability of divorce. Unless you are going to argue that women have no control over their own sexual behavior and thus their partner count, of course. Do you wish to argue that, Slumlord?

For the 2nd or 3rd time, what evidence do you have for this assertion?

And where is this evidence that women are out performing men? I’ve yet to see that. Passing a test or getting a job that has lower requirements than the competition must overcome IS NOT outperforming the competition.

feministhater When women enter they demand everything be changed to their liking. Eventually everything is and men can no longer act or be men, thus masculinity is crushed by gynocentrism and men leave to go achieve somewhere else where they can be men again.

There’s truth to this, but also we must bear in mind that women have an inherent bias towards their own sex, an in-group preference of 4 to 1. Women are 4x more likely to hire or promote a woman than a man. This is why women come to dominate a field, such as elementary teaching, or Human Resources, etc. because they will crowd men out via the ingroup preference. The ingroup preference is inherent to women it can be modified or attenuated by culture, but not erased. In my opinion, of course.

IMO as well, much of female behavior can be explained in a pretty straightforward manner via simple biology: sexual dimorphism, hidden estrus, the relative “cost” of eggs vs. sperm, gestation times, relative helplessness of human babies, and so forth. In any ancient tribal situation a woman traded to another tribe would be most successful if she could connect with the other women in her new tribe as soon as possible, and therefore more likely to leave progeny behind her. Some will object to this, and that’s ok, the nature of women is what it is regardless of whether one is a total, 6-day creationist, or a total-randomized world Darwinist.

The tannery story is probably true. As I have explained, this would have been negotiated between the company and the relevant union (Australian Workers Union, or whatever). The thinking was presumably that men had families to support whereas a woman was likely to be either bringing home a second paycheque or a single woman with fewer financial needs.

I am 60 now, so not quite Methuselah, but even I know that “the past is a foreign country; they do thinks differently there” as the famous line has it. People quickly forget how social expectations can change over time. For example, Australia in the 1960s was a rather different place to now, of course, but I refuse to concede that it was somehow “worse”.

It is unfair to modern men to blame them for what men did (and women often tacitly supported) generations ago. And do we really have to reminded that only men were conscripted for war, even as late as the Vietnam engagement? In that sense, men were also “shackled”. And if you didn’t go to Vietnam, you went to jail. I have a relative who faced the latter.

I was told the story of the exclusion of married women from the workforce in Broken Hill by a young woman I knew in college. She supported the policy. This was in about 1980.

“1) That women were financially discriminated against in the past.
(There is ample empirical evidence that this is true.)”

This is a bit of a broad brush over-generalisation. It is true that in some areas, such as employers being allowed to pay women less than men for the same work, women were financially discriminated against. Yet there were other policies that discriminated against men and in favor of women. For example, widows and deserted wives were eligible for financial assistance that deserted husbands were not entitled to etc.. Until 1978 in Australia, single fathers were not eligible for the same financial assistance as single mothers.

It is more accurate to say that both men and women were discriminated for and against in different areas, based on what society saw as their primary roles and functions at the time. To only mention women being financially discriminated against is to only tell half the story. Feminists, telling half the story since 1968 (TM).

Feminism has replaced that situation with one where the traffic is all one way. It is deemed perfectly acceptable for society to discriminate in favor of women or acknowledge women have needs specific to their gender. But it is never acceptable to discriminate in favor of men or acknowledge men have needs specific to their gender.

PuffyJacket,
I’m familiar with the video you are talking about, and with Friedman’s argument. (you quoted my comment wherein I stated more or less the same argument, so I’m not sure why you need to point this out to me) I made a statement in support of current law, which allows wage disparity between the sexes so long as any neutral factor causes it. Go back and watch the video again. Note that problems arise from “equal pay” laws where men or women are preferable to the other in a specific job. Whenever the reason for one sex being better at a job is due to anything other than genitalia, Friedman’s argument has no force as against current law. I’m not advocating “comparable worth” standards or any other feminist ideas. I only brought it up to point out that I take issue with cultural forces that lean against fairness in such suits. I only ever defended the evidentiary standards as they are.

BradA,
I’ve commented only on the evidentiary standards in a certain type of wage case. For you to tell me what I “worship” and “love”, what I “trust government to fix”, you must be possessed of extraordinary, no, superhuman abilities. Therefore, I can’t figure out why you continue to insist on demonstrating an apparent inability to even understand what those evidentiary standards are.

>You argued that the current system allows everyone to make the case fairly. My argument is that this is not true as it is biased in favor of women. It is also immoral to boot.

What part of the evidentiary standard under the equal pay act is biased in favor of females? The law does not contemplate the sex of the plaintiff. The same standard applies either way. What’s biased in favor of females is, as I explained in my original comment, is the mostly female consumer base and the media. You know, the people you would send someone to when they come to court seeking redress for unfair trade practices and discrimination.

I raised the question before, so now I’ll ask directly (a far more polite manner of discussion than simply telling you what you “love” and “worship”, by the way, and I would suggest you emulate it in the future, so as not to look like such an ass) How far would you take this? Is the mere existence of contract and property law, in your view, “socialism”? Should racketeering be allowed to prevent “a ruling elite telling everyone what they must do and how they must behave”? Do we need to throw out protections for intellectual property because they protect the incentive to create, which argument could in turn “be said to justify making many things illegal”?

An excellent accounting. I would add an accounting of the following (from the mouth of the monster, so to speak) to the intro, linking the infection to Europe from whence it came to inflict the people of the US (formally the land of the free):

In 1848, Mott and Stanton held a woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where a declaration of independence for women was drafted. Lucy Stone helped to organize the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850, a much larger event at which Sojourner Truth, Abby Kelley Foster, and others spoke sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women’s rights. Barbara Leigh Smith met with Mott in 1858, strengthening the link between the transatlantic feminist movements.

It is not really worth discussing much if you don’t find any imbalances in the application of the current system. I am glad you like it so much, except when I suppose you don’t. You are fairly unclear on that.

I could argue the issues you present, but those are definitely outside the scope of this blog. The application of employment ratios are within the scope, but we have beat that pretty much.

The law may be neutral in theory, such as divorce law, but it is applied to benefit one side over the others. The day I hear several successful suits against programs to fast track women (only) into management roles is the day I would seriously reevaluate the position of a non-blind justice.

@Renee Harris
“This is the problem. Woman have a job that we can do. Wife. But we don’t want it.” In response to my discussion of men vs. women in farming.

Absolutely correct. My grandmother embraced her role as a farmer’s wife. She has done more to make her family successful than we could ever try to measure. I have no doubt that her husband and sons were far more successful than they would’ve been without her constant support. She’s cooked uncountable meals, which she takes out to the fields, or cooks at her home, whichever her men need. She’s the happiest person I’ve ever known, and the kindest, and the most giving.

Note this as well: she didn’t have to be in the top 1% of intelligence to do this. She was a secretary or something like that, but when she married she dropped that job to focus on supporting her husband. She succeeded in raising 5 successful sons and helping her husband to succeed as well. My family probably owns or farms 25 to 30% of my entire hometown’s farmland.

A normal woman, with no special skills, can have a huge impact on her family by simply embracing the supportive homemaker role. Had she focused on her career, she’d have made no difference to anyone and probably only had one or two kids, who may or may not have been successful without her spending time with them. This is the pattern you see in today’s families.

I dispute it. Where does the assumption come from, that paying a group less for the same job is automatically discriminatory? A business will hire a teenager to do a cashier job at a lower rate than an older person with more experience, i.e. will pay them less for the same work. It’s the same as saying that health insurance companies were discriminating against women by having higher premiums for them, “just because” they cost the company more. You’re dismissing the possibility that they had reason to do so out of hand, without in any way demonstrating that 1) women are generally as good as men at various jobs, 2) that hiring men doesn’t have benefits such as physical strength and a particular attitude which may be a significant asset, and 3) hiring women doesn’t have negative factors other than cultural discrimination which affect productivity.

To explain #3, let’s say group A can do 10 units of work per day, and I can hire any number of A’s and they each do 10 units of work. Alternately group B can do 12 units of work per day, but having a B around makes 2 A’s less productive by 5 units each. While a B is more productive than an A in the abstract, if I already employ 2 A’s, factoring in the effects of hiring a B, I would be worse off. In this case, B’s are actually superior but still not worth hiring in many cases. This has nothing to say about whether an employer likes A’s or B’s.

Finally, if your proof simply consists of saying that women now do almost as well as men, that’s no proof of your thesis. Women benefit from all sorts of affirmative action, as well as other cultural factors leading people to want to hire them more than their skills deserve, such as avoiding discrimination lawsuits. And having a position and making a certain amount of money still has nothing to say about how productive these women are — the vast majority of all the major advancements and innovations and new ideas still come from men in all fields, and they still make up nearly all of the elite of every profession.

I sincerely appreciate your dialing it back a notch, and I will not make fun of you anymore.

The last thing I want is to be unclear. An employer needs to be free to operate in the interests of the business without regard to the preferences of social engineers. Job seekers need to be able to judged based on their ability to impact the bottom line.

Under current law, an employer will not lose a case if he bases his personnel decisions on business judgment and fights his case to the end. Even if he pays men or women more than the other, and even if his business judgment is objectively bad, he will have a defense at law. I think that’s a good thing.

Also under current law, someone genuinely being discriminated against in pay has a remedy at law if the discrimination is based solely on demographic factors. This encourages employers to reward merit. I think that’s a good thing.

The problem is that an employer may find it difficult to fight the case to its legal conclusion with feminist harpies shrieking about “misogyny” and “77 cents on the dollar” all over the evening news every night from the day the case is filed to the day a settlement is reached. I think that’s a bad thing, and that it leads employers to discriminate in favor of women. I can’t say how big a problem it is, as I’m not an economist, and I don’t have the necessary data, but I think it’s real.

I don’t fault the law for this particular problem. As I see it, employees are bargaining in the shadow, not of the law, but of the feminist media establishment’s power to poison the market itself against any convenient political target. Keep in mind that this only works because a large number of women are extremely eager to believe that they are being abused at every turn. The problem isn’t the law, and it isn’t even the media. The problem is women who have absorbed the message of feminism.

True. Feminism was full of double standards, hypocrisy and blind spots right from the get-go. I mentioned 1968 just to keep the discussion to more recent history (second wave feminism), and 1968 is a symbolic year for cultural change in much of the West.

I made a statement in support of current law, which allows wage disparity between the sexes so long as any neutral factor causes it. Go back and watch the video again. Note that problems arise from “equal pay” laws where men or women are preferable to the other in a specific job.

If one were to label the “current law” based on its actual effect, it would be most accurately called the “pro-discrimination job killing” law, because that is what it actually accomplishes.

In principle, the current law is effectively an “equal pay” law. When a sexist business is prevented from paying a lower wage to women (by means of legal action, legislation, etc.), its obvious logical recourse is to hire only men. The business is still paying a price by discriminating in favor of men (the same price as before), but now the equilibrium solution has shifted to hire men only (to avoid legal costs, penalties, etc.)

In practice, the law is even worse. Women are notorious whiners, and should they take their case to court, there will be plenty of feminist, “progressive”, and mangina judges ready to dish out ridiculous rulings in their favor.

The best thing that can be said about the current law is that it lines the pockets of lawyers. At worse it is pro-discriminatory and kills small businesses.

Among my late aunt’s papers, I found the pay scale of the Connecticut high school that hired her in 1956. All salaries were based on years of education, years of experience, plus extra pay for math teachers, which were hard to find then as now. It also listed the number of men and girls (their word) employed at each level.

So there was no “pay gap” in 1956, at least among public school teachers.

WOMEN RULE NOW…..Yeah, basically true. What happens to a culture when the same gender that only accounts for 2-3% of annual patents (maybe an inflated number at that, incredibly) gets to make all the decisions? Hmmm….I guess we’ll see/are seeing it.

Also; Would you guys drop this silly Tannery story? True or not, who cares? Likely all the male employees were alcoholic because their Anglo wives were 200 pounds. Maybe women were better at sewing together leather shit? Who cares?

The absence of economics education may be a deliberate policy of the state

Call me skeptical, but I doubt mandatory economics classes in high school would do any good, particularly given that most schools are already bastions of leftist propaganda as it is.

I voluntarily took an economics class when I was in high school. Approximately 25% of our corriculum involved watching Michael Moore movies and writing “essays” on them. Even the stoner dude that slept through every class managed to pass.

Well, regulations in general kill small businesses as the cost overhead associated with them destroys (or at least noticeably reduces) profits. Gender-related regulations, though, really mess things up since men and women are not equal nor identical, but are treated as such anyway by those who make the regulations.

I’m having a hard time following you. You label current law as “pro-discrimination” as though that’s some conversation-ending denouncement, and yet your primary concern seems to be that it fails to protect a “sexist business” from having to absorb the costs of its own decisions.

I’ve explained elsewhere in this thread that the effect on the incentives for employers can be more direct than you suggest, and can come into play with less actual litigation. Feminists don’t like current law because they would have to prove something to keep their case alive long enough to intimidate an employer into settlement. Their proposals involve things like making it easier to certify equal pay cases as class actions (like they failed to do to wal-mart) in order to up the risk for the defendant. It’s only about getting enough leverage to keep their attorneys paid in meritless cases.

In order to argue effectively against the changes they are pushing for (and which President Clinton is likely to be signing into law within three years of today) you need to understand the process of how these cases work with and without the provisions they want to add.

The current system favours small employers who can get away with hiring exclusively from their friends-and-family network.

In the long run, this ends up with a country that looks like Italy – lots of small businesses making plenty of profit, but unable to grow without experiencing crushing regulation as they get bigger, or would need to hire outside of trusted friends and family.

And you end up with a high unemployment rate, a vast unemployed underclass, and this little sliver of elite rich who just get richer and richer, and really wish they could help their fellow man or woman by giving them a job, but it would be absolute business suicide to do so.

Do any of you guys realize that I’m talking about one particular provision in the United States Code, and am not thereby necessarily endorsing every facet of everything ever done by government, along with every action of every feminist woman, every judge, and every bureaucrat in the history of the United States, and also everything else you don’t like?

You label current law as “pro-discrimination” as though that’s some conversation-ending denouncement, and yet your primary concern seems to be that it fails to protect a “sexist business” from having to absorb the costs of its own decisions.yet your primary concern seems to be that it fails to protect a “sexist business” from having to absorb the costs of its own decisions

My concern is the exact opposite. If a sexist business is required to pay a woman (of equal productivity) the same as a man, then it no longer bears an additional cost for hiring only men. This only reinforces the business’ sexist tendencies. I’ve already provided you with the reasoning behind why the legislation is “pro-discrimination”, don’t be cute with me.

I’ve explained elsewhere in this thread that the effect on the incentives for employers can be more direct than you suggest, and can come into play with less actual litigation.

But the actual effect on incentives per above is negative (increases sexism), so it doesn’t matter whether these changes can come about with less actual litigation. You are losing the forest for the trees here.

No offense, but I have gut feeling that you are a lawyer and suffering from “hammer in hand” syndrome.

Call me skeptical, but I doubt mandatory economics classes in high school would do any good

Not only would it not do any good, but would actually perpetuate the ignorance. Any Economics curriculum taught in public high schools would be Keynesian, more of the same rot that has brought most of the western world to the brink of collapse (and will soon push it over the edge).

Do any of you guys realize that I’m talking about one particular provision in the United States Code, and am not thereby necessarily endorsing every facet of everything ever done by government, along with every action of every feminist woman, every judge, and every bureaucrat in the history of the United States, and also everything else you don’t like?

Straw-man down. You do realize the core argument is that the current policy accomplishes the opposite of its objectives, right?

Slumlord, are you talking about Australia or America? I don’t understand your reference to affirmative action, because I don’t see any evidence that it has found much traction here in Australia (except in areas controlled directly by Labor governments).

You also write this:

“That women are outperforming men in contemporary society.
(and depending on the metrics used there is evidence of this as well)”

But I am not sure what you mean by outperforming. In what way? I am still reading recent commentary like this:

I think you fumbled most of what I said, but that’s ok. The bottom line is that the equal pay act creates a sort of bifurcated proceeding where the plaintiff brings a prima facie case, and then the defendant gets the chance to prove that the disparity is not due to unlawful practices. That’s a tough spot for the employer, but the plaintiff can’t prove a negative, so it kinda has to be that way.

When the vagina warrior lynch mobs come at you demanding you unthinkingly support whatever new equal pay bill they’ve not even read, you gotta challenge them to explain to you how it differs from what we have already. Pay particular attention to whether they’re doing more to change the end results from the jury, or just extending the process and driving up the costs in order to raise the likelihood of settlement. (it will always be the latter, but you will need to understand how) Finally, confront them with the fact that if their statistical innuendo game meant what they were suggesting, they’d be able to win their cases without tipping the scales for quick settlement. Step back and watch the hamster spin. If it stumbles, say something like, “96% of spouses of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women” or, “women do less paid work but consume more goods and services during their lifetimes” or, “women as a group pay less than zero taxes”.

But the actual effect on incentives per above is negative (increases sexism)

What’s wrong with sexism? Men bring home the bacon, and women make the sammiches. Sexism is good. Women out of government, faculties, and the traditionally male work environments would vastly improve many a screwed up situation.

If women are paid less, then it makes sense for employers to sack every male employee and solely employ women, thus saving the company anywhere between 15%-30% on the wage bill.

Economics is not a stand alone operation, it’s actually a second order phenomenon whose efficiency is dependent on cultural factors. Given the strong place of sexual roles in the past, many women could not, for cultural reasons, access jobs, nor would employers hire them because of social stigma. Secondly, the trade unions in many instances fought, as Julian mentioned, to keep women out of certain occupations.

In areas where men and women were both able to work, such as teaching, women were paid less.

That is all just rhetorical bullsh-t. I caught you in your own logic and math and you know it. You can’t debate the point made so you are trying to baffle with BS.

You know d-mn well every employer would hire only women if they thought they could save 25% on all wages across the board. You know that wont happen because you already know the wage gap is nonsense. I’m about to put you on shun.

Interesting data in there but it broadly tracks similar U.S. data I have seen. This quote pretty much sums up things.

The success of these young women relative to that of young men may reflect an educational and occupational mismatch between unattached younger men and unattached younger women that makes it more difficult for these highly educated women to find a suitable partner. Given the longstanding pattern of women to “marry up”, the shortage of equally or more successful young men may mean that these young women find it more difficult to find a suitable partner who is comfortable with a more successful partner.

Slumlord, Figure 2 in the report you cite seems to indicate that the number of women (and men) living alone at a young age is about 5 or 6 percent. In other words, not a preponderance.

(Excuse me if I have misinterpreted the report. It is late in the evening.)

What the report is surmising is what has long been observed: that it is the most successful women and the least successful men who have trouble finding partners, because of women’s tendency to hypergamy.

The Guardian article I cited shows that, in the population as a whole, men and women continue to follow traditional patterns of work (more paid work for men, more housework for women). The Guardian writer makes a case that women are not doing as well as men in Australian society. By his standards, of course.

A relatively small group of single women may be doing well, but there is no way of knowing if they will maintain their advantage. Most women do want to marry or enter a long term relationship and many want to start families. It is then that the traditional roles kick in.

If I may be permitted one anecdote, I knew a woman of about 30 who was a research scientist at a well-known national institution. She did marry, but to a man who it was generally felt was not up to her standard. Clever women are “pricing themselves out of the market” in a marriage sense.

As I have said, women make good civil servants and administrators in my experience. But in the more creative areas, they tend not to be exceptional. Some are. But if I were a clever young woman making a life choice, I would indulge in considerable introspection along the lines of – am I likely to have a really outstanding career, or should I follow the more traditional feminine path to happiness and parlay my youthful charm into snagging a good man?

One additional point. Women want to marry superior men. Not their “equals” in a career sense as the report implies. If women were prepared to marry their equivalents, perhaps most of the problem identified in the report you cite would be solved.

I wonder how many of the 20-somethings living alone with good career prospects are holding out for a really superior male, perhaps older and very successful, perhaps at their workplace.

Young women (16-25) will always outperform their average male counterparts. This is the part of a woman’s life where she gets paid, not just for work, but for simply existing. She gets more attention, more confidence and more leeway.

I put it along the lines of women trading their youth and attractiveness to corporations and government when they used to trade it for a good husband and moral life of being a wife and mother. You can’t have both.

In the end, men will always outperform women, as they work harder and rely less on looks and attention. They also gain confidence via experience and fortitude that women will never obtain.

I wonder how many of the 20-somethings living alone with good career prospects are holding out for a really superior male, perhaps older and very successful, perhaps at their workplace.

and

Clever women are “pricing themselves out of the market” in a marriage sense.

I don’t think that they’re pricing themselves out of the market, rather, they’re not willing to mate unless the man satisfies their hypergamic desires. Hypergamy being an “innate” and not deliberately chosen aspect of their natures. There is so much low hanging fruit for a guy with ambition to pick, that it surprises me that a lot of guys aren’t interested aren’t interested in putting in the effort. Rather they want to level down, a socialist interpretation of romance.

Great point made by feminist hater. The wage gap actually Increases as a woman gets older and loses her looks. There’s a study out there on the net.

Another point: Men aren’t just paid for the superior work they do. They are valued because they won’t quit on a whim. Women quit because they get bored sometimes. Also, sometimes men are paid more so that they have loyalty to the company. If the man hates his company, he might just quit to go start this own competing company… Something women never so.

I sincerely appreciate your dialing it back a notch, and I will not make fun of you anymore.

You were making fun of me?

You just sound like someone who really does believe in the state, except when he doesn’t of course. The disagreement is vague and not reality, but is claimed.

Do any of you guys realize that I’m talking about one particular provision in the United States Code, and am not thereby necessarily endorsing every facet of everything ever done by government, along with every action of every feminist woman, every judge, and every bureaucrat in the history of the United States, and also everything else you don’t like?

The problem is that it is a package deal today. And I would argue it is a logical consequence of sticking the camels nose many places it should not be. You can’t get “fair” without someone defining that and ultimately not being fair.

If it stumbles, say something like, “96% of spouses of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women” or, “women do less paid work but consume more goods and services during their lifetimes” or, “women as a group pay less than zero taxes”.

That was not the line you were pushing earlier. You seem to be going with the idea that what we have now is not that bad, we just don’t want to get worse. The problem is that what we have now is that bad.

Note that many today worship the State as well. They may not call it that, but they do so nevertheless, looking to government to solve or continue solving problems that government should have nothing to do with.

One additional point. Women want to marry superior men. Not their “equals” in a career sense as the report implies. If women were prepared to marry their equivalents, perhaps most of the problem identified in the report you cite would be solved.

I wonder how many of the 20-somethings living alone with good career prospects are holding out for a really superior male, perhaps older and very successful, perhaps at their workplace.

The flip side of this coin, sez me, is that most self-respecting “quality” men (i.e., alphas and beta-plusses) have no interest at all in marrying their economic competitors (SIWs) and most certainly don’t want to marry the few women who have reached the pinnacle of professional and economic success formerly the sole province of the professional male executive. Only an omega doormat, cuckhold fetishist, or worthless slacker leech has any interest in such women (and such women who pay any attention to such men do so out of purely mercenary, opportunistic, and self-serving motives, not for love).

As for young 20-something SIWs holding out for “superior” men to marry, best of luck to them, unless they stumble upon an alternate universe where the known laws of socioeconomics and the SMP/MMP don’t apply.

This reminds me of a former CIO who told of an arrangement with her husband that male children would take his last name and female children would take her last name. I can’t help but think it related that she was not liked much by even the women in the IT organization, or especially not the women.

A silly statement. Certainly not true in childbirth. Men wouldn’t even be in the competition.

How about giving men the respect they deserve? Men certainly are better than Chimps IN THE WAY THAT MATTERS. The defining characteristic of men is their mind.

The mind of men is greater than the mind of a woman. The honor bestowed upon women as mothers, daughters, and wives is mostly a function of the sentimentality of men, not because of inherent greatness of women.

Women may be the carrot that compel men to greatness. And men might be lazy slouches without that carrot. So maybe men aren’t inherently great either.

Only God is great. We stick to His plan and none of this matters anyways. But we don’t and so women need to be humbled.

This reminds me of a former CIO who told of an arrangement with her husband that male children would take his last name and female children would take her last name. I can’t help but think it related that she was not liked much by even the women in the IT organization, or especially not the women.

Jayzus, can you imagine what that husband must be like? Almost certainly one of the omega doormats, cuckhold fetishists, or worthless slacker leeches I mentioned in my last post.

Hell, why not give ALL of the kids her surname? Any “man” who would agree to that abominable idea doesn’t deserve to have any progeny perpetuate his family name.

“Felicity Reynolds, CEO of the Mercy Foundation says that while the numbers of homeless older women only represent “six to eight per cent of the total number of people counted as homeless in Australia,” we need to pay attention because this “is a problem that we appear to be at the very beginning of.”

Like high-earning women being taken to the cleaners by unjust Family Law/Courts, it’s not a crisis until it affects women.

Slumlord says: So do most of the single girls–who claim to be enjoying themselves alone-the problem is that they have had the experience of so many duds that that they’d rather go it alone. I can empathise.

Brad says: It is once again the fault of men. They would follow if men were only better!

No comment on the idea that women are out “living life” and “sampling the goods”, yet some claim that women still want to be married early. What planet is this on?

I say – Spot on Brad. Here in the US those girls are being told from day one that they can have it all and that they should live life to the fullest with the understanding that this means getting a college degree, starting a career, and sampling the goods before even considering marriage. How many girls under 27 today are seriously looking to marry?

Worse yet, what kind of man wants to marry a woman who has already been “sampled” by other men? What do you call a fool who doesn’t know he is a fool? What do you call a whore that doesn’t know she is a whore?

“I don’t think that they’re pricing themselves out of the market, rather, they’re not willing to mate unless the man satisfies their hypergamic desires. Hypergamy being an “innate” and not deliberately chosen aspect of their natures.”

Yes, the poor dears have no control over anything. Moreover, your argument is a non-sequiter. The first and second sentences do not logically go together. One can well accept that female hypergamy is innate, driven by evolutionary psychology and natural selection. But it does not follow from that, that women have no control over pricing themselves out of the market. It is only because women demand policies in other areas of life that are designed to promote women at the expense of men, thus causing a mismatch between female hypergamy and the sexual market pool.

Female hypergamy is innate, to some degree or another. Modern feminism is an ideological imposition on society that exacerbates the costs of female hypergamy.

Women want men who have higher status, success, income than them. But they also want to incessantly claim they are downtrodden and oppressed if, on average, men are any more successful in any area of life than women are. Women want boiled ice.

As an economist, you know perfectly well that the figures you present aren’t really helpful. Since the only metric that matters in the hourly rate for the same type of work. You can only compare apples with apples.

These aren’t my figures. These are the figures of feminists. They defined the problem as the wage gap, and presented the data (see my improved chart for a better look). Yet their own data shows that changing the law didn’t do anything for the macro situation. It took 17 years after the law was changed for the gap feminists defined to start to close. Drilling down into the details of hourly rates for the same work, experience, etc helps debunk the myth that women are systematically underpaid, but there is no reason the macro figure feminists have defined shouldn’t have moved if in fact the law was causing women to be paid less.

I was going to mention also Slumlord, that you neglect to mention the fact that until recently women were eligible for the aged pension at a younger age than men in Australia (despite the fact that women live longer than men). Women used to be eligible for the age pension at 60 (versus 65 for men), until the age gap was gradually phased out. Instead, you only talk about how women were discriminated against in the past. Let’s ignore all the areas where men were traditionally discriminated against.

Notice also that it invariably takes much longer for men to achieve legal parity with women in areas where men were traditionally discriminated against (such as the retirement age) compared to areas where women faced traditional discrimination (lower minimum wages). Women’s rights always come first. Equal rights for men or equal responsibilities for women always come much later, if at all.

But go ahead. Keep up with this one-eyed view that only women faced traditional discrimination, and have now thrown off their shackles and marched forward on their own steam.

Comparing the average earnings of males and females immediately before and after it was legal to discriminate in setting pay rates, demonstrates fairly effectively how much of the traditional earnings gap was due to ‘unequal pay for equal work’ being legally permitted.

It seems that if you apply that comparison to the United States, it shows little gap. Hence it blows Slumlord’s argument out of the water. So he is basically sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling ‘la la la. I’m not listening’.

“what we have now” could include laws against kidnapping and murder and several thousand pages of social engineering stashed away in our tax code. Now, if I said kidnapping should be a crime, but we shouldn’t let the fem-bots eliminate the mens rea of the crime, such that you’d be guilty of kidnapping any time a woman was riding in your car, I’d fully expect you to jump down my throat and compare me to Stalin. Your justification in this that, “The problem is that it is a package deal today.” is based on absolutely nothing. Not one provision of the U.S. Code or the statutes of any state or any judicial decision or regulation depends for its existence on any other. (srsly, are you just fucking with me?)

Intelligent adults should be able to discuss the merits of a single policy without stuffing the entire CFR into each other’s mouths. If you will go as far as this laughable “package deal” premise to avoid addressing the issue I came here to discuss, I am forced to dismiss you as too simple to separate any two concepts long enough to form a coherent thought about either of them.

You decided that you were able to know the entire contents of my mind based solely on the fact that I said something you couldn’t understand. I will not argue about who I am with some random stranger on the internet.

“As an economist, you know perfectly well that the figures you present aren’t really helpful. Since the only metric that matters in the hourly rate for the same type of work. You can only compare apples with apples.”

This is a spurious red herring. If the argument being presented is that women were being paid less than men for essentially equal work due to the law enabling employers to do so, a change in the law should immediately lead to a significant reduction in the gap between average male and female earnings BOTH within the same job category AND across broader measures of labor market outcomes. There is no reason to believe it would have no impact in reducing the gap between average male and female earnings across the labor market as a whole, only in individual occupations. What happens in individual occupations still has some influence on wider labor market outcomes.

The only way this argument could have any merit is if it could be shown that the change in the law did lead to a substantial narrowing of average male and female earnings within individual occupations, but this was somehow cancelled out by changes in the labor market elsewhere that had an equal and opposite impact on the broader labour market outcomes statistics. Not impossible. But highly unlikely. Not the most probable explanation for the statistics given.

You are trying to muddy the waters and do a ‘baffle them with BS’ routine as these statistics demolish your argument.

IMO as well, much of female behavior can be explained in a pretty straightforward manner via simple biology: sexual dimorphism, hidden estrus, the relative “cost” of eggs vs. sperm, gestation times, relative helplessness of human babies, and so forth. In any ancient tribal situation a woman traded to another tribe would be most successful if she could connect with the other women in her new tribe as soon as possible, and therefore more likely to leave progeny behind her. Some will object to this, and that’s ok, the nature of women is what it is regardless of whether one is a total, 6-day creationist, or a total-randomized world Darwinist.

I would agree, except the choice of words at the end: someone in favor of a stochastic process called evolution does not necessarily see the world as ‘totally randomized’. Do you know any examples of such weird Darwinists? If not, why the need for straw-manning?

I might respond that placing the blame on Eve eating the fruit is a good example of a ‘thought-terminating cliché’.

It’s all just primitive cave women living in modern times. Although society, culture and civilization have advanced in the modern age, modern women still have the same brain that prehistoric women had.

Womens’ inherent greed, selfishness and narcissism may have served women well during earlier prehistoric times, but these behavioral tendencies are maladaptive for the modern age and destructive. (It was imperative for primitive women to secure resources and food for her and her childrens’ survival, and to secure the cooperation of the best male acting as a provider and protector that she could get.)

ExfernalI would agree, except the choice of words at the end: someone in favor of a stochastic process called evolution does not necessarily see the world as ‘totally randomized’. Do you know any examples of such weird Darwinists? If not, why the need for straw-manning?

Obviously I was deliberately casting as wide a net as I could in order to make a clear point: women are what they are, regardless of how we got “here”. This kind of nitpicking is worse than useless, it’s rabbit-trail chasing.

I don’t care what flavor of Darwinist someone is, frankly, nor do I care what flavor of Creationist someone is either: I know people on multiple sides of the “origins” isue, as well as some whose creation stories are totally orthogonal, such as Indians. The point is to get some grasp of the reality of women, and to encourage other men to come to terms with reality. Not to endlessly tapdance on the head of a pin about irrelevancies.

Dear Slumlord, you read about that decision by the Supreme Court of Kangaroos in America? Yea, so glad women are working harder and for longer. So glad they are making the money. Let them support themselves. Learn to let go of the stress.

It’s now both smarter and healthier not to seek to do what women are doing. So glad it ain’t me.

It is difficult to pin down what your argument is when you just keep popping in and linking to different studies, etc. Are you arguing that the law had great effect, but that this effect was masked by a sudden inflow of women into the labor force depressing women’s wages relative to men’s? If so, the study you linked to has a chart showing a (nearly) straight line increase in women’s labor force participation between 1940 and 1990 (when the chart ends). It would be better if the data feminists provide went back further, but it strikes me that you are grasping at anything you can find to avoid the most obvious conclusion; the law didn’t make an impact, or at least not enough to notice. You offered that link as proof that the EPA made a significant but coincidentally unobservable difference. Yet, the author of the article didn’t see the EPA as noteworthy enough to mention when discussing why the pay gap changed/remained flat. To the extent that you’ve stumbled on proof that the EPA made a difference, you have one up on the economist who is explaining the issue.

I think this is highly unlikely. Feminists have a huge incentive to point to the law as having made a big difference, and to explain why that difference can’t be measured in their own metric. This after all is essential to their narrative that before modern feminism women were “shackled” by the patriarchy. Granted I haven’t read every feminist treatise on the subject, but the ones I’ve been able to read are remarkably silent on the subject. If they mention the EPA they do so either ignoring the data altogether, or averaging the changes in the ratio over the 50 years since it passed. With this in mind, I believe they would be very grateful if you could prove that the legal change really made a big difference, albeit one which due to terrible luck was entirely unobservable in the macro numbers they track.

I say – Spot on Brad. Here in the US those girls are being told from day one that they can have it all and that they should live life to the fullest with the understanding that this means getting a college degree, starting a career, and sampling the goods before even considering marriage. How many girls under 27 today are seriously looking to marry?
An non virgin age. 26 want to marry. And she will be as she got a boy in mind .
But she told me to wait unrill Marrige ( which may not be God plan for me ) and she has a master degrees.
Worse yet, what kind of man wants to marry a woman who has already been “sampled” by other men? What do you call a fool who doesn’t know he is a fool? Fool can be godly too
Is godly to demand naked pic and bjs by the third date ? If she does she a slut if she does not she not submitted .

Is godly to demand naked pic and bjs by the third date ? If she does she a slut if she does not she not submitted .

Renee – So your answer to my “how many” question is “one”. I have some follow up questions / comments:

1) Why are these Christians dating to begin with?
2) The 3rd date IS NOT marriage, so why would she submit to anyone but her father and mother when not yet married (if she is Christian that is)?
3)If the guy is demanding naked pics and BJs from a woman he isn’t married to, he obviously is a cad and NOT marriage material for a genuine Christian woman. Is this really that hard for you to see?

“It is difficult to pin down what your argument is when you just keep popping in and linking to different studies, etc.”

He doesn’t have an argument, that’s why. He is just putting up a smokescreen and clutching at straws.

It is another common tactic of those who have clearly lost the argument to dump a long article/study, and allude to it supporting their case when it does no such thing. No doubt also relishing wasting everyone’s time going through the article with a fine tooth comb to try to find the crucial points that aren’t there.

I suppose we get into questions about what it really means to be “successful” in the current state of mankind. One could argue that women (at least in some parts of the West) are doing very well. They have maximised male support and protection, both direct and indirect (through taxes and social services and the medical and other technology that men have mostly invented and continue to invent). (If feminists had a better sense of humour, they might reflect on their continual appropriation of technology invented almost entirely by men to verbally abuse men more effectively.)

Seriously, these are deep waters. I wonder if the availability of birth control and abortion and,, equally importantly, their being approved by “society” (which, as Steve Sailer likes to say, is code for “women”) are not the crucial drivers. An attractive modern woman need do almost nothing to earn her existence. She is the most attractive parasite nature has ever evolved.

JM Keynes supposedly said, “in the long run we are all dead”. Modern women seem to be working on this moral basis. I mean that once society (including almost all the churches) does not expect you to have any children you don’t find completely convenient, it is a simple step to not bothering to have many – or any – children. And I don’t imagine the average fashionable young woman feels much commitment to passing on a culture that she is likely to believe is irredeemably “sexist”, “racist” and has produced nothing but misery for humanity (apart from her mobile phone).

No doubt she was being paid to be an idiot, but one young white female journalist wrote recently that she wasn’t going to have children because it would spread “white privilege”. It is easy to dismiss her as a weirdo, but she could just as easily be “the tip of an iceberg”.

@jdg
Is godly to demand naked pic and bjs by the third date ? If she does she a slut if she does not she not submitted .

Renee – So your answer to my “how many” question is “one”. I have some follow up questions / comments:

1) Why are these Christians dating to begin with?
2) The 3rd date IS NOT marriage, so why would she submit to anyone but her father and mother when not yet married (if she is Christian that is)?

was online dating and the same guys with the all girl are sluts where the Virgins mantra were asking for nude pics. I learned my lesson About online dating .
If I can do not submitted b4 marriage, why should he court me?
I just get confused when I read here we want vigrin and I see my paul waahier/ David platt ish guy friend date and married girl who slept around :-_

Renee, the ideal for many men is an attractive virgin who is interested in sleeping with you as soon as possible (perhaps after marriage). As for submission, a girlfriend is under no obligation to submit to her man, but if she is difficult, disagreeable and never does what you suggest, she is likely to make a bad wife if you do eventually marry her.

TFH writing about women’s lack of suitability for the modern world:I have said this for a long time. The biggest piece of evidence is how they doggedly oppose productivity in all its forms, and are specifically attracted to male behavior that is not beneficial to society, while repulsed by male behavior that moves society forward.

Others have come to eerily similar conclusions about women. For example, the blogger Whiskey has several essays on the role of vampires and other alpha-type males such as royalty in female entertainment and fantasy. Their ideal world is a static one where everyone knows who the biggest kahuna is. He (the big kahuna) spends his time putting ‘unworthy’ men in their place when he isn’t bedding the heroine. Nothing ever really changes, and there’s no motion towards any improvement of the human condition. This worldview is incompatible with technological and other progress at a very fundamental level.

Julian O’Dea wrote:One could argue that women (at least in some parts of the West) are doing very well. They have maximised male support and protection, both direct and indirect

Unfortunately for them, this maximization amounts to a huge economic misallocation of resources. It has to correct, and will correct soon.

An attractive modern woman need do almost nothing to earn her existence. She is the most attractive parasite nature has ever evolved.

The Other McCain recently wrote a post about Clementine Ford, a militant feminist who hates men and wants to be paid for it. This is a woman who produces absolutely nothing of value and has no desire to. Her sole ambition is to nag and scold those who do produce (men) and to be compensated for it. This looks like innate female behavior carried to its logical endpoint, and it sure isn’t pretty.

It is difficult to pin down what your argument is when you just keep popping in and linking to different studies,

Uhmm…. It’s difficult to argue in good faith if my position is misrepresented.

Firstly,

With regard to economic matters I put forward the fact that women were “shackled”–your term not mine–by being paid less than the men for equivalent work. You called for evidence in your post for my assertion. I provided “studies and links” to papers which show that this was a fact. Furthermore, I had the unexpected testimony of Johnnycomelately who also confirmed what I said.

I think I’ve satisfied the evidential criteria. I’m sorry that some of your commentators find it troubling to read.

Secondly, It was you who put forward that aggregate male female earnings was an accurate metric of the effect of the equal pay legislation. In one of my first replies, I argued that this was an inappropriate metric to use given the confounding variables it contained. I argued that the only metric that mattered were hourly pay rates for the same type of work. Aggregate pay rates are an irrelevant metric to assess the success of the equal pay act.

Thirdly,

Are you arguing that the law had great effect, but that this effect was masked by a sudden inflow of women into the labor force depressing women’s wages relative to men’s?

I made no comment with regard to the effect of the legislation with regard to aggregate female earnings, since I stated that the comparator metric was invalid due to confounding variables.This was your preferred instrument of proof However Economics Professor Claudia Goldin shows quite clearly that there was a large influx of underskilled women into the workplace which kept aggregate wages down. By 1980 when women skilled up, and structural changes had occurred in the economy aggregate wages increased. This last link was a reply to Nick S to show that large numbers of women were entering the market which would have served to suppress aggregate wage rates.

All I stated was that prior to the equal pay act in the U.S, and its equivalent in other countries, women were legitimately discriminated against with regard to pay and that this was a form of hypergamic affirmative action which was unjust.

As my position has misstated and my evidence ignored, I feel that this discussion is not proceeding in good faith and therefore have nothing further to add.

It is difficult to pin down what your argument is when you just keep popping in and linking to different studies,

Uhmm…. It’s difficult to argue in good faith if my position is misrepresented.

I have no desire to misrepresent your arguments. I’m just trying to pin them down so I can either learn from them or explain why I think they are wrong. You don’t just accuse me of misrepresenting your arguments though, you also claim you didn’t state easily verifiable things, like (emphasis mine):

With regard to economic matters I put forward the fact that women were “shackled“–your term not mine–by being paid less than the men for equivalent work.

The thing is when you take the shackles away from some women they actually outperform men (in certain areas) and many of you simply can’t accept this fact blaming it on Feminist mind control, whatever.

This is an old theme for you, as you wrote much the same on your own blog in Hypergamic Affirmative Action back in September of 2012 (note that I linked to my response to this in the OP as well):

The manosphere may not like this result but the fact is that women have been able to effectively compete with men when the shackles of social convention have been removed.

You used the term, I responded to it, now you deny it. All I can do is provide the direct quotes and links. Feel free to continue to deny it, but I don’t think it helps your case. Anyone who wants to see if I’m misrepresenting you can easily check.

You called for evidence in your post for my assertion. I provided “studies and links” to papers which show that this was a fact. Furthermore, I had the unexpected testimony of Johnnycomelately who also confirmed what I said.

…

Secondly, It was you who put forward that aggregate male female earnings was an accurate metric of the effect of the equal pay legislation. In one of my first replies, I argued that this was an inappropriate metric to use given the confounding variables it contained. I argued that the only metric that mattered were hourly pay rates for the same type of work. Aggregate pay rates are an irrelevant metric to assess the success of the equal pay act.

You made a macro claim (that women were systemically paid less than the value of their labor because it was permitted legally), and supported this with anecdotal evidence. I offered macro data showing that changing the law had no effect. The change in ratios didn’t start until almost twenty years later. You are arguing that we can’t trust the macro number the feminists themselves calculate, so we should dive into studies which attempt to determine the theoretical value of a women’s labor compared to men.

I’ve read a number of these studies, and they suffer from a common problem; they are trying to model something very complex without all of the information required to accurately do so. This is the same type of study where economists are persistently confounded as to why men “enjoy a marriage premium” and women do not. They look at years of schooling, years on the job, and a number of other factors, but they can’t accurately gauge intangibles like willingness to move or commute, willingness to work in a high stress, dangerous, dirty environment, etc. They can’t effectively measure culture and motivations. Even if they had the data, they are hampered by assumptions that men and women are fundamentally the same, with the same drives, abilities, and preferences.

However Economics Professor Claudia Goldin shows quite clearly that there was a large influx of underskilled women into the workplace which kept aggregate wages down. By 1980 when women skilled up, and structural changes had occurred in the economy aggregate wages increased.

This is arguing that women’s lower wages were driven by lower levels of skill, that employers were reacting to real differences between men and women. You offer this as proof of the opposite; that employers were arbitrarily paying women less, out of a desire to hamper them (or raise men up).

As my position has misstated and my evidence ignored, I feel that this discussion is not proceeding in good faith and therefore have nothing further to add.

You accuse me of arguing in bad faith while denying something as easy to verify as you using the term shackle. If you don’t want to make your case, or if you don’t want to make your case here, I’m fine either way.

“a woman has a very difficult time deciding who to get impregnated by.”

Ha ha. True. And man do they get mad when they choose wrong. Imagine a scenario involving Laura, a hot alpha female and Amy, her lifelong friend who has always been considerably less attractive. The boys played cooties with Laura and Amy sulked. Laura’s boobs came first and Amy sulked. Laura got in a sorority and Amy sulked. But they remained besties through it all. Laura married a stud, Amy a nerd. But, uh oh! Amy’s nerd came up with an app that exploded while Laura’s stud was off playing in a rec. softball league. Amy and the nerd off being millionaires while Laura has to listen to her stud talk about how he went three for four with a triple. Imagine the absolutely steaming anger Laura feels over the unfairness. And what? OMG was that a tingle she felt when Amy brought her nerd along for a visit.

This is why women hate a free-market, entrepreneurial society, full of technological disruptions.

Technology is only part of the reason. The most fundamental reason why women hate and fear the free market economy is the same one as why they hate and fear AI: it demands performance based on logic and merit for success, the polar opposite of the FI. If free market conditions applied to every aspect of womens’ lives, 95-99 percent of them would would be doomed.

Renee – If I can do not submitted b4 marriage, why should he court me?

Because the Bible indicates that a never married women is still under the authority of her father. Your would suitors should know this. They need to see you submitted to your parents (especially your father, if possible) and / or those rightly over you in the Church, not to themselves before marriage. If you think you should submit to a man you are NOT married to (and for all you know may never be married to) then you are mistaken. If a man wants you to submit to himself before you are married, then he also is in error.

eeriker says:
June 24, 2015 at 12:54 pm
“This reminds me of a former CIO who told of an arrangement with her husband that male children would take his last name and female children would take her last name. I can’t help but think it related that she was not liked much by even the women in the IT organization, or especially not the women.

Jayzus, can you imagine what that husband must be like? Almost certainly one of the omega doormats, cuckhold fetishists, or worthless slacker leeches I mentioned in my last post.

Hell, why not give ALL of the kids her surname? Any “man” who would agree to that abominable idea doesn’t deserve to have any progeny perpetuate his family name.”

Watch this feminist broad intentionally abort all her male fetuses, leaving only the females alive to be born.

“This last link was a reply to Nick S to show that large numbers of women were entering the market which would have served to suppress aggregate wage rates.”

Large numbers of women entering the workforce could suppress average wage levels, if the supply of labor rose faster than demand. However, if that was the case it would suppress wage levels for all workers (men and women), not just women. So it doesn’t really explain why the gap between average male and female earnings across the board didn’t drop once the law changed.

“However Economics Professor Claudia Goldin shows quite clearly that there was a large influx of underskilled women into the workplace which kept aggregate wages down.”

It doesn’t make much sense that large numbers of low skill female workers would have entered the workforce immediately after laws were changed mandating ‘equal pay’ etc.

During times when it was customary for women to be paid less than men (even ostensibly for the same work), there would have been more incentive for employers to hire women who had fewer skills. After all, even if they were less productive the employer could pay them less money. You see this today with things like junior wage rates. Often employers will hire a young worker if they are able to pay them less money, even if they are less productive than workers on a senior wage (managers tending very much to be people who understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing).

Similarly, if it was customary for women to be paid less than men, then low skill, low productivity women would have had more incentive to take a job. After all, there would have been less gap between what they were paid under the existing wage levels and what they would achieve in a free non-discriminatory market anyway. For a woman with more skills and high productivity, there would be less incentive to take a job if she was just going to be paid the same ‘little woman’ wage (unless she was able to negotiate higher pay). It would make more sense for such a woman to devote her time to other things, or perhaps try to work for herself etc.

As a general rule, lower minimum wages and conditions for any group usually have the effect of making the more marginal members of that group (those with few marketable skills) more employable. High minimum wages and conditions usually have the effect of pricing the low skilled out of the market, and render only the high skilled employable. You can probably guess where I am going with this.

It makes no sense that a change in the law towards higher wages for women would lead to a massive influx of low skill, low productivity women into the workforce. And it makes no sense that employers would start hiring a lot more low skill, low productivity women once women started successfully demanding higher wages than previously and it was no longer considered acceptable to automatically pay women less. If anything, the opposite should have occurred. Low skill women would have been shown the door once they were no longer seen as cheap to employ.

You are clutching at straws to find any explanation to ignore the bleeding obvious.

Julian O’Dea says:
June 26, 2015 at 4:30 am
Clementine Ford is an absolute disgrace. She might have been invented to make women look bad.

+1 Julian. I have the honour of being barred from commenting on her column in Fairfax’s “Daily Life”, that hideous cesspool of misandry. I have never attacked her person in my comments (well maybe once) but rather I criticised the subject of her particular topic de jour.

It’s easy being considered a towering intellect in a sheltered workshop. She wouldn’t dare to post anything here, since when us men are “unshackled” (!) her ideas would get torn to pieces. Suffice to say, her latest effort of posing naked with swear words written on herself is just so classy, and has done so much in propelling her into the ranks of serious journalism!

Thanks. This, in fact, is THE biggest question for humanity, and is going to be upon us sooner than the masses and world government realise :

Change happens faster now than before. I had never thought about AI until I read you comments and now I wonder just how this will pan out, I’m still wondering but one thing is sure:
The future will not be like the past, and it will get very ugly at some point. I try to think beyond the short term with the words ‘thy Kingdom come, thy will be done’. In the mean time we best strap ourselves in for the ride…

RM:“The authors believe we should emulate the bonobo way of life, which is just plain daffy. Maybe they’ve forgotten that bonobos are brushing up with extinction while humans are seven billion strong.”
They’re separated from violent, monkey-chewing chimpanzees mainly by their “culture”/behaviour and a teeny bit of genetics.
And the Mighty Congo River.
Any takers for what will happen to them nicey-nicey bonobos if Central Africa is ever “developed?
By airheaded EU foreign “aid”, or the assiduous Chinese? Spiffy modern eight-lane suspension bridge across the Congo, to link some sort of Trans-African highway?
(the aptly named troglodytes is yer actual chimps, the orangey blob is bonobos)
Crazy. Who would do that? The consequences are obvious. Like building a bridge across the Med.
Oh, wait ..

Re: AI
Tonight I went to the local supermarket and they have replaced many cash registers with a self check out area. Now there is only 1 check out girl for about a dozen registers, and patrons swipe their own purchases and pay by card or cash.
And the AI has become self aware, the first words uttered were; ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’. These things are replacing humans [mostly girls] at an alarming rate.

Tam the Bam says:They’re separated from violent, monkey-chewing chimpanzees mainly by their “culture”/behaviour and a teeny bit of genetics.
And the Mighty Congo River.

Chimps are notoriously poor swimmers, and some biologists believe that the presence of the river initiated a speciation event between bonobos and standard chimpanzees. Human beings have successfully landed on the moon, but the author of the book ‘Demonic Males’ wants us to emulate a creature that can’t even cross a goddamn river. That’s feminism in a nutshell – they want us to put our best foot backwards from the space age to well before the stone age.

Any takers for what will happen to them nicey-nicey bonobos if Central Africa is ever “developed?

My money is that this wonderful flower-child species is on the fast-track to extinction. Having said that, I would like to see what can be done to preserve them. It definitely sucks for them that they have to depend on human goodwill for their continued existence.

Now there is only 1 check out girl for about a dozen registers, and patrons swipe their own purchases and pay by card or cash.

One grocery store locally tried that for about a year, then dumped it. I suspect that losses were too high, it likely is easy to slip stuff past the one girl. It might work in, say, parts of Minnesota or the Dakotas. In other areas where stealing from stores isn’t frowned on as much…might not work at all.

And the AI has become self aware, the first words uttered were; ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’.

That’s not self aware. That’s just a rule based system reacting to an external input. It’s less “smart” than your phone.

You decided that you were able to know the entire contents of my mind based solely on the fact that I said something you couldn’t understand. I will not argue about who I am with some random stranger on the internet.

You are the one who started posting in a forum where people argue. You just want to throw your points out and not have them challenged. That is not how it works here.

Having some good laws today does not negate that the bulk of laws are stupid if not outright immoral. Add in the Supreme Court legislating form the bench and you get a mess that will collapse soon, all the other benefits or not. We no longer live in a nation of legal principle, it is whatever our Oligarchs think is appropriate.

I cannot agree with your original assumption that the core anti-discrimination law was good. It sound good in some theory, but falls apart when it is examined. Freedom is much preferable to slavery to a capricious master, even when the slavery seems good at first and/or on the surface.

Much of it is that you miss the implications and results of what you support.

Renee, I didn’t marry until 26, so I can relate to that. I would have married earlier, but didn’t find the right one and few candidates were about that fit my physical and Christian requirements. (My own lack of confidence and such didn’t help most likely.)

I would still argue that we need places for like minded people to meet in that manner, but the legal system will work against true long term bonds until it is overthrown.

Demonic Males was supposedly written partly to counter feminist claims that men are not “naturally aggressive”. The problem is that people tend to think women cannot also be violent. In the modern world, they certainly can be.

The self checkouts go back and forth here in Texas. I saw at least one place where I recall they pulled them, but they are showing up more places, like in the Wal-Marts and some grocery stores. I am guessing that they will stay as long as the cost of shrinkage (the term for such related theft) and salaries is weighted properly.

I have now lived in two areas with enough that shop there where theft is certainly a concern as the moral compunction is not strongly against it, even though this is Texas.

I hate when they get confused and claim an item was added when it was not. Worse still is when they complain when you remove a full bag to make room for a new one.

RFID tracking is likely to make theft concerns lower as the system will know everything that goes by, not just what you scan.

Demonic Males was supposedly written partly to counter feminist claims that men are not “naturally aggressive”.

Right, it went up against the blank slate / nurture argument. Of course, if “male violence is a social construct” can be demolished, then so can “gender is a social construct”, oopsy.

The problem is that people tend to think women cannot also be violent. In the modern world, they certainly can be.

A few years ago some sort of smart guy pointed out that women tend to mainly indulge their really bad behavior in private. There’s something to that, although GrrlPowr somewhat contradicts it. If female violence is mainly done in secret, who would know? Embarressed men and dead children tell no tales.

Lol, yeah. I remember reading that and laughing my ass off. It’s ironic that she insists that it’s misogynistic and “men have it easy” in that industry (probably because they actually WORK sweetheart) while women have trouble moving up the latter. Then she opens her own company, and discovers that hiring only women was idiotic beyond all reason. LOL.

Even then, she’s so full of herself that she STILL, after all that hell, says this:

“And while I stand by my initial reason for excluding male employees – because they have an easy ride in TV…”

Maybe they don’t have it easy you fool, they just WORK HARD. Ever think of that darling? Next, she flies in the opposite direction and says:

“…if I were to do it again, I’d definitely employ men. In fact, I’d probably employ only men.”